Quote:
Originally Posted by WaterAndWindSpirit
In a setting where food is extremely valuable, it's gambling enough to use seeds for pebbles (I may be wrong in saying it was originally played like I just said though).
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Mancala has no random element, which means that very few people will play it for money even casually and no amateur will play for money against a professional. Would you risk your money in a chess game against Kasparov?
To get the equivalents of Doc Holliday and professional riverboat gamblers (which IMHO is the thing that sets poker in the old west apart from say dicing in historical TL1 societies
in a world building sense) it needs to have a skill component (so that professional gamblers can expect to win over the long run -- say at the end of a month) but also luck based element (so that casual players can hope to win over a few games at one evening).