What each board actually is

Three games with almost nothing in common except the island they are played on: one is a cue sport, one is a race, one is arithmetic in your hands.

Plan of a carrom board: base lines on all four sides, a centre circle, four corner pockets

Carrom

A cue sport played with your finger.

The board everyone in the house already knows how to use. Ours is cut to the tournament laws: a 74 cm bed of halmilla, sanded to 800 grit and finished in six coats of lacquer so a struck coin runs true and stops where it should. The frame is jak, 7.5 cm wide and heavy enough that a hard shot doesn't shift the board off the table.

Boric acid powder is included, and you will use it. A dry board is a slow board.

  • Playing bed74 cm square
  • Pockets4.45 cm, netted
  • Men9 black, 9 brown, 1 queen
  • Striker4.13 cm, 15 g

Play it on the table Build one

Plan of a pancha keliya board: thirteen cells to a side, with a circuit round the outside, a row across the middle, a column climbing from the bottom edge, and two diagonals meeting at an apex

Pancha keliya

The game that only comes out in April.

Thirteen cells to a side. A circuit of squares runs right round the outside; a row crosses the middle; a column climbs from the bottom edge up to that row; and two diagonals rise from the ends of the row to meet at a single apex. The two players start at opposite bottom corners and run the circuit in opposite directions, so they meet head on somewhere along a side and one of them does not survive it.

Shells are thrown onto a coconut husk and scored by how many land mouth up. Every shell up scores nothing at all. None up is twelve. Anything between is worth the number that came up. A one, a five or a twelve earns another throw. Your pieces sit locked on your corner until a one or a five releases one — that release is sallang.

You take an opponent by stopping on them or by passing straight over them, but never while they stand on a crossed square. A crossed square is a geval. Get all three of your pieces to the apex first and the game is yours.

  • Board13 cells square
  • ShellsSix, and a husk
  • PiecesThree a side
  • Safe squaresTwelve geval

The game is named for the five points you can score, not for the number of shells you throw.

Throw the shells on the table Build one

Plan of an olinda poruwa: two rows of seven cups with a store at each end

Olinda keliya

Fourteen cups, fifty-six seeds, no luck at all.

The island's mancala, cut into one plank so the grain runs unbroken from end to end. Lift every seed out of a cup, drop them one at a time going anticlockwise, and if the last one falls into a cup that already had seeds, lift that cup and keep going. Turns run long. Good players see four laps ahead.

The counters are olinda seeds — scarlet with a black eye, and so consistent in weight that goldsmiths across South Asia used them on the scale before they trusted brass. Boards in the Colombo museum from the Kandyan period are cut the same way we cut ours, with seven cups a side; nine-cup boards exist too, and we make those to order.

  • PoruwaOne plank, 62 cm
  • Cups7 a side, 2 stores
  • Seeds56, sorted by weight
  • EndsTurned brass finials

Sow a cup on the table Build one