East Africa · Swahili coast

Bao

also called Bao la kiswahili · Bawo

Bao is played on four rows of eight pits and is widely held to be the most strategically demanding game in the mancala family. On the Swahili coast it carries a formal competitive culture, with recognised masters and a vocabulary of named positions.

Played in: Tanzania · Kenya · Zanzibar · Comoros · Malawi

— The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Click or tap to play.

— What is playing against you

Never searches. It scores each sowing once, and on hard peeks at five of your replies.

Scores each move once, no lookahead 1 move ahead bao-engine.ts — aiTurn()

Turns on a panel over the board listing the moves the machine considered on its last turn, the score it gave each one, and how many positions it examined to get there. The numbers are the engine's own.

This is not a search. It sows from each of its pits in turn, scores the result at five points per seed captured, and takes the best. On hard it adds one look at your reply — but only at the first five of your legal moves. The code says so plainly: `// limit for performance`. If your best answer happens to be the sixth in the list, it never sees it. That truncation is worth dwelling on. It is not an approximation with a principle behind it, like alpha-beta pruning, which only discards lines it has proved cannot matter. It is an arbitrary cut made to keep the frame rate up, and it means the opponent has a blind spot with no theory behind where the blind spot falls.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

This is the simplified board only. Every pit starts with two seeds; there is no namua entering stage, no nyumba, and none of the kutakata and kunamua distinctions that give Bao its reputation. What remains is a four-row sowing game with capture from the facing column. Treat it as an introduction to the shape of the board, not as Bao.

— How it is played

The full game, Bao la kiswahili, has two stages. In the namua stage each player still holds seeds in hand and enters one per turn, capturing when it lands in a loaded inner-row pit facing an occupied enemy pit. Once the hand is empty the game passes to the mtaji stage, played entirely from the board. One pit, the nyumba or house, is treated specially and may not be freely emptied.

— Sources

Townshend, P. (1979). "Mankala in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Distributional Analysis." Azania 14, 109–138.
de Voogt, A. J. (1995). Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Leiden: CNWS.

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