The History of Fanorona
The national board game of Madagascar, and a source of real cultural pride and legend.
From Alquerque to the Highlands of Madagascar
Fanorona is believed to have descended from Alquerque, an ancient capture-and-jump game that most likely reached Madagascar with Arab or Southeast Asian traders. Alquerque is also the shared ancestor of checkers/draughts, which makes Fanorona and checkers distant cousins: both kept the basic idea of jumping to capture, while independently building very different rules around it.
Malagasy players reshaped the imported game into something distinctly their own: a larger 5x9 board with a mix of orthogonal and diagonal lines, and the approach/withdrawal capture system that has no equivalent in Alquerque or checkers. Some of the oldest surviving Fanorona boards, carved in stone near Antananarivo, are estimated to date from the 16th or 17th century.
A Game That (Allegedly) Decided a Throne
According to a well-known Malagasy legend, King Ralambo once tested his two sons to see who was more fit to succeed him: he pretended to be gravely ill and had them summoned, to see which would arrive first. The elder son, absorbed in a difficult Fanorona position, is said to have stayed to finish the game - so his younger brother arrived first and, by the story's telling, went on to inherit the throne. As with most oral histories passed down over centuries, the details vary between retellings and the episode can't be verified as historical fact, but it's still cited today as evidence of just how seriously Fanorona has long been taken in Madagascar.
Still Madagascar's Game
Fanorona remains widely played across Madagascar today and is often described as the country's national board game, played casually in villages and towns and also studied competitively. Smaller variants exist too - a 3x3 version (Fanoron-Telo, roughly as deep as tic-tac-toe) and a 5x5 version (Fanoron-Dimy) - but the 5x9 board described on this page (Fanoron-Tsivy) is the standard, best-known form.
The game has also drawn real academic interest: computer analysis published in 2008 weakly solved Fanorona, establishing that a perfectly-played game ends in a draw - putting it in the same rare company as checkers, another ancient game precisely solved by modern computers.