CHAPTER XVII.—THE MALAGASY GAME OF FANÒRONA.
By W. Montgomery.
Nobody can very long reside in Madagascar, or in the central parts of it at any rate, without occasionally observing little companies of the natives bending eagerly over some mathematical-looking diagram rudely scratched on a roadside stone, or on the top of a rock, or, more roughly still, on the sun-baked clay of the wayside. If you look a little at the figure of the diagram, and consider the multiplicity of squares, diagonals, and adjacent parallelograms involved in it, you may think the people are discussing some Malagasy rider to one or other of the propositions in the Second Book of Euclid. Take the trouble to ask, however, and you will find that they are simply playing at their national game, the Fanòrona.
Diagram 1.
The fanòrona board is a rectangular parallelogram, divided into thirty-two equal spaces. Gather these, in your eye, into eight larger squares, containing four each; draw the diagonal lines in each of the eight, and the fanòrona figure is complete. Forty-four movable pieces are required for the game—twenty-two on each side.
With the Malagasy these are usually little pebbles and potsherds, or beans and berries. We, however, will call them the Black and the White pieces. The two players sit opposite each other, having the long sides of the fanòrona adjacent to them. The pieces are then arranged on the corners or angle-points; not on the squares, as in chess or draughts. There are five of these long lines on the board, each containing, of course, nine angle-points, and the pieces are thus arranged:
| Black: | First | Line | 1 | .. .. | 9 |
| Second | „ | 1 | .. .. | 9 | |
| White: | Fourth | „ | 1 | .. .. | 9 |
| Fifth | „ | 1 | .. .. | 9 |
The third, or central line, is occupied by the eight remaining pieces, placed alternately, thus:
| Black | 1, 3, 6, 8 |
| White | 2, 4, 7, 9 |