This game is piece of tradition of Cape Verde "Oril/Mancala/Oware 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.

It is among the oldest known games to still be widely played today. The United States has a larger mancala-playing population. A traditional mancala game called Warra was still played in Louisiana in the early 20th century, and a commercial version called Kalah became popular in the 1940s. In Cape Verde, mancala is known as "oril". It is played in the Islands and was brought to the United States by Cape Verdean immigrants.

It is played to this day in Cape Verdean communities in New England. Recent studies of mancala rules have given insight into the distribution of mancala. This distribution has been linked to migration routes, which may go back several hundred years.