Bao

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Bao
Bao la kiswahili, bao la kucheza,
bao la kete, bao la komwe
Played in:
Zanzibar and Swahili coast
Multiple lap
Two cycles
  Captures are reintroduced
8 holes per row
Four rows

Bao (Swahili for: "board") is a mancala game played in Swahili and Bajun communities in Eastern Africa, e.g. Zanzibar, coastal Tanzania and Kenya, and the Comores. The game is also known by the Sakalava in northwestern Madagascar. Nowadays, it has also arrived in the Swahili hinterland, where several Muslim people have adopted the game. The Yao in Malawi changed its original name to bawo. Bao is also played by the Bangubangu in Kisangani, D. R. of Congo, and the game was also reported from Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi.

The game was first described by the French traveller Flacourt in 1658 who saw it on Madagascar. Thomas Hyde found it 1658 on Anjouan, Comores. The Bao poem "Bao Naligwa" was written in the 1820s by the Swahili poet Muyaka bin Haji in Mombasa, Kenya. The oldest still surviving Bao board was made in 1896 in Malawi and is kept today in the British Museum in London.

In 1966, the Chama cha Bao (Bao Society) was formed in Tanzania to promote the game. On Zanzibar, there are about 16 Bao clubs and about 10 masters who are called fundi ("artist") or bingwa ("master"). The strongest players are Abdulrahim Muhiddin Foum, Masoud Hassan Ali (known as "Kijumbe") and Ali Maulid Hussein ("Maulidi"). Regular championships are held on Zanzibar and Lamu (Kenya) and in Malawi. The only tournament that was held in Europe was organized in 2002 on the Mindsports Olympiad (MSO) in Cambridge, England.

Some call Bao the "king of mancala games", as it is usually considered the most difficult and complex of them.

Contents

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Rules

Bao board consists in four rows of eight holes. All the holes are rounded, but the fourth from the right in the middle rows, that is squarish and called nyumba ("house").

board
Initial position. Also, each player holds 22 more seeds in reserve.

The game is played per turns.

Move is multilap and only on the player's own pits (the two rows closest to him). Moves can be with or without capture. Captures are mandatory.

If the first lap of a move is without capture, the full move is without capture.

There is an initial phase with special rules, called namua, while players still hold seeds in their hands.

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Sowing without capturing (takasa)

If there are still reserve seeds (namua stage), and it is not possible to make a capture, to play the player takes a seed from the reserve and adds it to any of the holes he has on the front row except the nyumba.

  • If the player has not "destroyed" his nyumba (he has not safaried it and it has not been captured) he can only add the seed to a hole containing more than one seed, and only can start from a singleton if the only non empty holes in the front rows are singletons.

Then the player takes all the seeds from this hole and sows them in the following holes in any sense, clockwise or anticlockwise, on the players own side. If the last seed is sown in a non empty hole its content is taken and the sowing keeps on, and so on until the last seed falls in an empty hole and the turn ends.

If the only non empty hole in the front row is the house what the player must do is taking one reserve seed and one seed from the nyumba and sow them to the right or to the left of the nyumba. If the house has now just 5 seeds (fewer than the initial 6) it is not considered a nyumba, but if it gets more seeds again (6 or more) it will be again a house.

If the player has no more reserve seeds the takasa move starts in a different way: the player chooses any hole (including the house) containing more than one seed from his front row and sows with its seeds in the sense he wants. If there are only singletons on the front row he can begin with a back row hole (not a singleton). The move keeps on with multiple laps as explained before.

In any case the front row can never be emptied, so if the only non singleton and non empty hole on the front row is the first or the last one the sense of sowing can not be towards the back row, but towards the center of the front row.

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Sowing with capturing

If still in namua stage, the player must put a seed from his reserve in a hole on his front row that has an opponent's hole opposite to it which is not empty. Then he takes the contents of the opponent's hole and sows these seeds beginning from a kichwa (an extrem hole in the front row) and going to the center of the row.

  • If he has captured from any of the two holes on the right of the row, he must start on the right kichwa.
  • If he has captured from any of the two holes on the left of the row, he must start on the left kichwa.
  • If he has captured in any of the four central holes, and he was already sowing in a clockwise sense, he starts on the left. If in an anticlockwise sense, no the right. It is, he keeps the same sense he already had.
  • In any other case, he can choose from which kichwa to start.

He keeps on sowing as in takasa, but if a sowing ends in a non empty hole on the front row, and if the opposite hole is not empty, he captures the seeds and sows them as before. Another difference with takasa is that if the player still has the house and ends a sowing in it he can choose to either stop the move or keep on with the nyumba contents (doing safari).

If there were no reserve seeds, the player begins sowing from any hole (not a singleton) in a way that the sowing will end in a non empty hole in the front row whose opposite hole is also non empty, and so capturing. This is a mtaji. The move keeps on according to the previous explanation, but if a sowing ends in the nyumba he must safari (keep on the sowing).

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Goal and end of the game

The winner is the player who has either captured all counters of the opponent's front row (which is then empty) or is leaving him only singletons, so that the opponent will not be able to move.

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Takasia

There's an extra rule used in just a few special cases. Most players can survive without knowing it. Its name is takasia.

If after a takasa move only a single opponent's hole is under threat of being captured, and the opponent must also takasa, this hole is takasiaed and the opponent cannot start to takasa from it, and if a lap ends in it, the move also ends. If there is still a nyumba, it cannot be takasiaed. Also, if there is a single non-empty pit or a single pit containing more than one counter in the front row, it cannot be takasiaed.

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Trivia

To count the seeds at the beginning players usually put all the seeds in their pits in one of the following ways:

board
board

Then remove the 20 seeds from the back row and the two seeds from the right most hole.

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See also

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References

Boyd, A. W. 
(1979) 'The Game of Bao - Lamu Style', in MILA 1977; 6 (1): 81-89.
Dandouau, A. 
(1909) 'Jeux Malgaches', in Bulletin de l'Académie Malgache; 7: 81-97.
Deledicq, A. & Popova, A. 
(1977) Wari et Solo: Le Jeu de Calcul Africain, Paris: Cedic.
Donkers, H. H. L. M., van den Herik H. J. & Uiterwijk, J. W. H. M. 
(2003) 'Opponent Models in Bao: Conditions of a successful Application', in Advances in Computer Games, Dordrecht; 10: 307-323.
Donkers, H. H. L. M. 
(2001) Zanzibar Bao Rules for the Computer, Universiteit Maastricht, September 5.
Donkers, H. H. L. M. & Uiterwijk, J. W. H. M. 
(2002) Programming Bao, IKAT, Department of Computer Science, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht.
Duckworth, P. 
(2004) Bao: The Game as played in Malawi.
Flacourt, E. de. 
(1658) Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar. Paris, 108-110.
Hall, R. de Z.
(1953) 'Bao', in Tanganyika Notes and Records; 34 (January): 57-61.
Hyde, T. 
(1694) De Ludis Orientalibus (Libri Duo: Historia Nerdiludii). Oxford, 226-232.
Ingrams, W. H. 
(1921) Zanzibar: Its History and People, London: Frank Cass & Co., 257-259.
Irwin, R. 
(1998) 'Culture: Bao - The Game of Africa', in Travel Africa (Summer); 4.
Korabiewicz, W. 
(1960) 'The African Game of Bau', in Zeszty Etnograficzne Museum Kultury i Sztuki Ludowej, t. Band I.
Kronenburg, T., Donkers H. H. L. M. & de Voogt, A. J.
(2006) Never-Ending Moves in Bao, in ICGA Journal; 29 (2): 74-78.
Machatscheck, H. 
(1972) Zug um Zug: Die Zauberwelt der Brettspiele, Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 161.
Murray, H. J. R. 
(1951) A History of Board-Games other than Chess, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 220-223.
National Museum of Tanzania 
(1971) The Rules of Bao, Dar es Salaam.
Nierse, R. 
(2001) Introduction to Bao, Vorhout.
Nierse, R. 
(2001) Tactics of Bao, Vorhout.
Popova, A. 
(1976) 'Les Mancala Africain', in Cahiers d'Études Africaines; 16 (3-4): 451-453.
Reineman, M. 
(2000) 'Bao doet de hersens kraken', in Utrechts Nieuwsblad, March 10.
Russ, L. 
(2000) The Complete Mancala Games Book: How to Play the World’s Oldest Board Games. New York: Marlowe & Company, 122-127.
Sanderson, M. G. 
(1913) 'Native Games of Central Africa', in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; 43: 726.
Townshend, P. 
(1977) 'Le Jeux de Mancala au Zaïre, au Ruanda et au Burundi', in Les Cahiers de CEDAF – ASDOC Studies. Institut Africain–CEDAF / Africa Instituut-ASDOC, Tervuren (Belgium) (3): 41-45.
Townshend, P. 
(1979) 'Mankala in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Distributional Analysis', in Azania: Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa; 14: 115-117.
Townshend, P. 
(1979) 'Anthropological Perspectives on Bao (Mankala) Games', in Institute of African Studies Paper, Nairobi: University of Nairobi; Paper 114.
Townshend, P. 
(1982) 'Bao (Mankala): The Swahili Ethic in African Idiom', in Paideuma; 28: 175-191.
Townshend, P. 
(1986) Games in Culture: A Contextual Analysis of the Swahili Board Game and its relevance to Variation in African Mankala. Ph.D.-thesis. University of Cambridge.
Voogt, A. J. de. 
(1995) Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Leiden: CNWS Publications.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(1998) 'Seeded Players: East African Game of Bao', in Natural History (New York, USA) February.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(2000) 'Strategy in Bao: An Introduction', in Abstract Games Magazine; Issue 4 (Winter): 21-22.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(2001) 'Strategy in Bao: Notation and the House', in Abstract Games Magazine; Issue 5 (Spring): 22-23.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(2001) 'Strategy in Bao: The Beauty is Complexity', in Abstract Games Magazine; Issue 7 (Autumn): 24-25.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(2002) 'Reproducing Board Game Positions: Western Chess and African Bao', in Swiss Journal of Psychology; 61 (4): 221-233.
Voogt, A. J. de.
(2001) 'Mancala: Games That Count', in Expedition; 43 (1): 38-46.
Voogt, A. J. de. 
(2003) 'Muyaka's Poetry in the History of Bao', in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies; 66: 61-65.
Zaslavsky, C. 
(1974) Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture. Boston: Prindle, Weber & Schmidt, 122-123 & 128-129.
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Personal references

Bautista i Roca, V. 
Personal Experiences on Zanzibar. Tanzania (short periods in 1997, 1998 and 1999).
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External Links

Retrieved from "http://www.wikimanqala.org/wiki/Bao"
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