Bao

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Initial setup in Bao la kiswahili ¹

Bao,
a traditional mancala board game played in most of East Africa, most popular among the Swahili people of Tanzania, especially Zanzibar and Kenya. Bao is the swahili word for board or board game. ¹ . Bao is a two-player abstract strategy game, and considered as one of the most complex mancala games. The Bao board has four rows of eight pits, each player owns two adjacent rows.

See also

• Awari
• Kalah

Selected Publications

• Thomas Hyde (1694). De Ludis Orientalibus (Libri Duo: Historia Nerdiludii), Oxford ²

1978 ...

• Philip Townshend (1978). Games of Strategy: A new Look at Correlates. The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, Vol. 4, No. 4
• Philip Townshend (1979). Anthropological perspectives on bao (mankala) games. Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, amazon

1980 ...

• Philip Townshend (1982). Bao (mankala): the Swahili ethic in African idiom. Paideuma 28
• Alex de Voogt (1995). Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Ph.D. Thesis, CNWS Publications
• Alex de Voogt (1998). Seeded Players. Natural History Magazine, 2/98

2000 ...

• Alex de Voogt (2002). Reproducing board game positions: Western Chess and African Bao. Swiss Journal of Psychology, Vol 61, No. 4
• Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk, Alex de Voogt (2002). Mancala Games - Topics in Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. In Jean Retschitzki, Rosita Haddad-Zubel (eds.) (2002). Step by Step. Proceedings of the 4th Colloquium Board Games in Academia. Edition Universitaires Fribourg Suisse
• Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk (2002). Programming Bao. 7th Computer Olympiad Workshop, pdf
• Jeroen Donkers, Jaap van den Herik, Jos Uiterwijk (2003). Opponent Models in Bao: Conditions of a Successfull Application. Advances in Computer Games 10
• Alex de Voogt (2003). Muyaka's poetry in the history of Bao. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 66, No. 1
• Jeroen Donkers, Jaap van den Herik, Jos Uiterwijk, (2004). Probabilistic Opponent-Model Search in Bao. Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2004, LNCS 3166, Springer
• Tom Kronenburg, Jeroen Donkers, Alex de Voogt (2006). Never-Ending Moves in Bao. ICGA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2

2010 ...

• Alex de Voogt, Lisa Rougetet, Nathan Epstein (2018). Using Mancala in the Mathematics Classroom. The Mathematics Teacher, Vol. 112, No. 1

External Links

• Bao (mancala game) from Wikipedia
• Bao from Wikimanqala
• Bao la kiswahili from Mancala World
• Bao (Zanzibar) rules by Rob Nierse, The Game Cabinet
• Bao (Malawi) rules related to Pete Duckworth by Mark Chikoko, transcribed by Adrian Brooks, The Game Cabinet
• Simon Phillips, Philippe Saisse, Pino Palladino - Mancala, Zoetermeer, November 15, 2009, YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

References