Sports · Mind games

Mind sports: train the brain, compete with the mind.

Chess, bao, draughts, go, backgammon, scrabble, sudoku and the Rubik's Cube. Different boards, the same muscles: memory, planning, patience and the courage to decide. MOFULI promotes mind sports because they are cheap to start, open to every age, and they build habits that business and school both need.

Explore the games Draughts page

A hand-made banana-fibre chess board from Uganda — Photo: Denis kasozi · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The games

Eight classics, one family.

Each game has a history, a community and a clear starting path. Pick one and play ten minutes a day.

Chess

The game of kings

Chess descends from chaturanga, played in India around the 6th century, which travelled through Persia and the Arab world to Europe. Modern rules, with the powerful queen, settled in Europe around the end of the 15th century. FIDE, the international chess federation, was founded in 1924.

Each side: king, queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns.
Goal: checkmate, attacking the king so it cannot escape.
Start: learn piece moves, then basic checkmates (king and queen vs king), then openings.
Online play and puzzles make it easy to practise daily on a phone.

A Staunton chess set — Photo: Wilfredor · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Bao la Kiswahili

East Africa's grand strategy game

Bao belongs to the mancala family, sowing games played across Africa for centuries. Bao la Kiswahili, played on the Swahili coast and in Zanzibar on a board of four rows of eight holes, is considered one of the most complex mancala games in the world. It is played fast, often in public, with spectators following every sowing.

Two stages: in namua seeds enter from each player's store; in mtaji all seeds are on the board.
Captures take seeds from the opponent's front row and sow them back into your own.
Players lose when their front row is empty or they cannot move.
A living heritage: learning bao keeps a Swahili tradition alive.

Bao players in Stone Town, Zanzibar — Photo: Moongateclimber · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Go (weiqi, baduk)

Simple rules, endless depth

Go was created in China more than two and a half thousand years ago and is loved in Japan and Korea. Players place black and white stones to surround territory. In 2016 the computer program AlphaGo beat world-class player Lee Sedol, a landmark for artificial intelligence.

Beginners use 9×9 or 13×13 boards; the full board is 19×19.
Stones with no free neighbouring points are captured.
The winner controls more territory at the end.

Go stones on a 13×13 board — Photo: Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Backgammon

Strategy meets probability

Backgammon's roots reach back to race games of the ancient Middle East. Dice bring luck into every turn, but strong players win over time because they understand probability, risk and timing, the same skills a trader uses.

Each player races 15 checkers around the board and bears them off.
A single checker on a point can be hit and sent back.
A great game for learning to manage risk.

A backgammon board with Greek coffee — Photo: Nikos Kitsakis · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Scrabble

A vocabulary contest

Created in the United States in the 1930s by Alfred Mosher Butts and given the name Scrabble in the following decade, the game rewards vocabulary, arithmetic and board vision. Clubs and competitions exist worldwide, and Swahili word games are a natural way to strengthen literacy.

Form words on a 15×15 grid using seven letter tiles.
Premium squares multiply letter or word scores.
Learn short high-value words first.

Scrabble letter tiles — Photo: Valentijn Sessink · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Sudoku

Pure logic on paper

The modern puzzle appeared in a US puzzle magazine in 1979 as “Number Place” and became Sudoku in Japan in the 1980s before a worldwide boom in the 2000s. No mathematics is needed, only logic: every row, column and 3×3 box must contain the digits 1 to 9 once.

Scan for the only place a digit can go.
Use pencil marks for candidates in hard puzzles.
Ten minutes a day keeps concentration sharp.

A 9×9 sudoku puzzle — Photo: LithiumFlash · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Rubik's Cube

Memory and algorithms in your hands

Hungarian professor Ernő Rubik invented the cube in 1974. It has more than 43 quintillion positions, yet anyone can learn to solve it with a handful of memorised sequences. Speedcubing is a global sport with official competitions run by the World Cube Association.