About the Quincala Project

About the Quincala Games

The Quincala Games are abstract board games for two players invented by Ulf Åberg. The name Quincala comes from the Latin "quin-" meaning "five" (since that number plays an important part in the design), and "-cala" from "Mancala", the ancient family of African games from which the sowing part of the move is inspired. I had the first idea of the games in 1977 and the original wooden pieces were made in 1979. Currently, there are two size of board ("Classic" and "Mini") and there are three distinct versions of the game reasonably tested:

Standard Quincala was the original version played on the larger Classic board; it is well tested and the variant with 5 sizes of piece was used for the tournament 2009. The rules are quite complex, but once learned it plays very well.
Mini Quincala Knocking is the latest variant; it was used for the tournament 2010. The rules are much easier than for Standard Quincala, and it normally plays under 20 minutes. There is still scope for some deep analysis to determine if it has a forced draw or not, and whether that impacts on the quality of the game.
Quincala Mixing is tested but is my least favourite; it is played on the Classic board but with less rules the Standard version. I think it doesn't play quite as well as the above two versions.

About Ulf Åberg

Ulf Åberg was born in Sweden, but currently lives in Birmingham, UK. Contact Ulf on to get more information, to join the Quincala Newsletter, to send game scores and/or report a bug in the software.

About AB Games Ltd

AB Games Ltd (Company number 4120179) was formed to provide a limited company framework to deal with any revenue that would come from the Quincala project. After trading shortly in 2012, the company is now closed. Quincala game sets will be sold directly from Ulf in the future. All copyright in the name of AB Games Ltd will be the sole property of the author.

Legal Notice

The Quincala Game Viewer software is released under GPL version 3, which is a so called open source licence. That means, among many other things, that it is free to download, re-distribute and use, and that I have to make the relevant source code available for perusal and modification. The full legal notice for the software is posted here.

This licence does not provide any license or right to use any trademark owned by Ulf Åberg in any form or media. QUINCALA® is a registered trademark owned by Ulf Åberg.

Security and Privacy

The Quincala project has a strong policy about optimising security and privacy for the users. No personal data will be kept unless absolutely necessary for functional or legal reasons. The software is as secure and stable as we can do it; if by any chance you find a security flaw or any other bug, please contact Ulf on and the necessary actions will be taken as soon as possible.

It is always best practice to make sure any downloaded software is scanned for viruses before use. The Quincala software mainly exchanges information with the computer it is running on via the clipboard. Future versions of the Quincala software might enable saving user settings and history locally.

Hopefully, a "Short URL" facility will be implemented in the near future; this involves having to store certain data online. Notices about the privacy implications of this facility will be prominent.