What is it?
Didier [Guillion] developed Awale, a shareware program which plays 16 Mancala variants. However, many games have incorrect rules, either because they are based on unreliable sources or because deliberately the size of the board and the number of counters was changed to facilitate their implementation.—manqala.org
According to the copyright notice, Awale dates back to 1996. It still uses the original 256-color graphics, which must have been spectacular at the time, but look a bit grainy by now. The game runs in a window within a window, the point of this arrangement remains a mystery.
Unfortunately, Awale now lacks what could still make it interesting: the ability to run on older systems. For a Windows 3.1 game it is pretty remarkable, but the Windows 3.1 version is not only no longer supported, it is no longer available. Maybe you will find it on some shareware site or FTP archive, but chances are not very high. Same goes for the 68k version. All you can get it for is PPC and Windows 9x, and for both there are better Mancalas, and some of them free. What I am offering here is the oldest version I could find (from 1998); according to the readme, it at least still runs under Win32s.
