Mancala
Mancala is one of the oldest known games to still be widely played today. "Mancala" is a generic name for a family of two-player turn-based strategy board games played with small stones, beans, or seeds and rows of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface. The objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent's pieces. Versions of the game date back to the 7th century, and evidence suggests the game existed in ancient Egypt.
Robert Charles Bell
Robert Charles Bell (1917–2002) was the author of several books on board games, most importantly "Board and Table Games 1 & 2" (reprinted as "Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations"). This work won the Premier Award of the Doctors' Hobbies Exhibition, London. He was instrumental in popularizing traditional games, and is acknowledged as one of 11 "principal sources" in David Parlett's "The Oxford History of Board Games".