Bao strategy

A relay stops on the first seed that lands somewhere empty, and only a stop in your own inner row can capture. So the whole of a turn is chosen before you lift it: follow the handful round, find where it runs out, and look at what is straight across from there. Lifting to see what happens is how beginners give seeds away.

You cannot capture without one, because the landing pit has to have been empty when your seed arrived. Players new to this treat an empty inner pit as a hole to be filled; it is the opposite. It is the only place from which you can reach across the board, and it stays useful exactly as long as you leave it alone.

They capture by stopping in an empty pit of their inner row and taking whatever faces it — which is a pit of yours. So a fat pit in your inner row facing an empty pit of theirs is a prize, and it grows more tempting every turn you leave it. Spend it, or accept that they are coming for it.

Seeds you take are gone for good, so the pull is always toward the biggest pile on offer. The reply is the other half of the sum. Amani the elder, the practice opponent, plays exactly this — his own gain, minus the best answer you have to it — and that single subtraction is the whole of why he is harder than Sefu, the greedy one.

The Long Game also takes the outer pit behind the one it captures, so a loaded pit with a loaded pit behind it is eight seeds in one landing — a quarter of a side. It is not symmetrical, though: an empty inner pit protects the outer pit behind it completely, because nothing is taken from a column whose facing pit is bare.

Bank captures nothing and the two sides never touch, so you are not playing your opponent so much as racing them. A seed enters your house only when a relay passes it, so the lifts worth making are the long ones that go by it more than once. Two seeds home in a turn is a good turn; one is the usual.