Is it just me, or is white a heavy favourite to win this game (stats also say so)? This game is quite similar to the Bantumi game found on Nokia phones (except that in Bantumi, if you land the last seed of a sow in an empty hole on your side of the board, you not only get all the seeds from the opposite hole, you also put that last seed in your collection hole - and this itself is a variant of Kalah), and that game is a win for the first player. Of course, this change in rules (deliberately? bug?) could make all the difference.

I wouldn't mind seeing a handful of variants. Since the variants share a lot of the rules, it should be easier to add a variant than the initial implementation. (Unless Fencer is a spagetti coder, but that I doubt).