bawo bao
Welcome!

Bawo is the Malawian version of an ancient African board game based around a simple counting apparatus. The games Bawo (Malawi), Bao (Tanzania) and Omweso (Uganda) belong to the globally known mancala group of "count and capture" board games.

They are famous as the most complex of all mancala games. They are played on a board with 4 rows of 8 holes, and are "multi-lap" games with several sowings on each turn.

This page aims to collect, link and archive information about this game. It also wants to provide possibilities to play the game. If you know any sources that are valuable and not mentioned on this site, please contact me.

To give you a first impression how fast and fascinating the game can be, here's a video of two very capable Bawo-players: