This is Fanorona, an ancient board game from Madagascar. It requires MRJ 2.0 (the Mac Release of Java, part of MacOS 8.1), but it is a standalone Macintosh application, not a Java applet. Fanorona is freeware, and may be included on CD-ROMs.
Notes:
• Fanorona is normally played in ten-game matches (one game for each side of each opening move). This program does not keep track of the match score, but it will vary its opening play allowing a match to be played. However, it plays only the riatra (normal game), not the vela phase usually played after each riatra game of a match.
• You may encounter some harmless redisplay glitches from Java.
• Source code and a web applet version of the game are available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/180a/projects/fanorona/
David Eppstein
UC Irvine, Dept. of Information & Computer Science