An interesting question. Due to its very nature I imagine it's pretty difficult to get an accurate time when Mao was actually created as Mao. Further complicating the issue is the fact it's directly based on other games, and possibly started only as a variant to those games moreso than one of it's own.
Mao seems to owe a lot of its history to the Waterloo area in Canada (Ontario?) and Cambridge, England. Supposedly it came from Canada to England via a scholastic challenge (Math-olympiad or such) in the early 90s. The oldest documented variant I've heard of only dates back to 1986. I've also found reference to someone quoting their first game (they called it Mau Mau, though) happened in 1973, while he was traveling in Europe. This is all fairly light evidence though, only found sparsely and the info rarely connects together before the 90s.
I'll quote a full post I found a while back that may be of use as well:
Quote:
We used to play this game at school - that would have been around 1967 - in London, England. We called it Switch, or Twitch, but essentially it was the same game as is called Mao in the USA now. In the early 70's I remember many people playing it in England under a variety of names (eg Bartok).
Around 1974 I met some Australians (from New South Wales) who had written
a paper on it (which I still have) and called it Swedish Eights, and said it was derived from Crazy Eights. Germans call the same game Mau-Mau, and I wonder whether the American name Mao comes from this, rather than being
anything to do with Mao Tse Tung. In "The History of Card Games", David
Parlett says that Mau-Mau was popular in Germany in the 1960's.
My take is that SOME form of it existed by the mid 60s, possibly even earlier. This could be Bartok, Mau Mau, etc. It's hard to say when it actually became Mao and the concept of what Mao IS had some consistency to them, but I'd say that probably only happened in the mid 80s.
Last edited on 2008-08-21 22:14:10 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Thu Aug 21,2008 10:13 pm
