This carved piece of heavy wood at the Mother's Garden Panorama Restaurant in Baguio caught my attention. It is called Sungka. The sight of it reminds of me childhood and the terms such as sunog, bahay, bawal-bilang!, touch move, etc.
Yeah, I played this as a kid.
Sungka is a traditional board game in the Philippines often played by children and even adults during siesta time.
It is also known in other Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, with variations on how it is played of course, where in they call it congkak.
With the advent of online games and computers, this seemed to have been out of sight along with the diverse array of almost-forgotten traditional games.
However, some fiesta organizers in various provinces still hold Sungka competitions or sometimes just use it as a parlor game in an effort to reinvent it. It is not, after all, just a simple past time game but a mind game as well.
If you do not see any wooden sungka anymore, you can dig holes on the ground as alternative, get your hands and nails dirty, start counting and distributing shells, and enjoy!
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The pearls here can be shells or stones or any pieces of stuff that can fit in the holes. Make sure that you are comfortable holding those pieces of whatever stuff because winning means having to get more number of those pieces in your hands.
