Game-Fanorona

Fanorona, the board game of Madagascar: forty-five points joined by lines,
nine across and five up, with twenty-two stones a side. A stone steps along a
line to the next point. Step up to an enemy stone, or straight away from one,
and that stone is taken with every enemy stone in an unbroken row beyond it.
Taking is compulsory, and a stone that has taken may go on taking in the same
move.

This distribution is the game, an opponent for it, and a program to play it
in a terminal.

    use Game::Fanorona;

    my $game = Game::Fanorona->new;
    $game->play('d3-e3A') or die $game->error->message;
    print $game->turn, "\n";
    print "$_->{string} takes @{ $_->{takes} }\n" for $game->steps;

Or, from a shell:

    fanorona
    fanorona --side black --level 5
    fanorona --variant telo

    5  X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X    Black X  22 left  taken 0
       | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / |
    4  X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X
       | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ |
    3  X---O---X--[O]-(+)--X---O---X---O
       | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / |
    2  O---O---O---O---O---O---O---O---O
       | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ | / | \ |
    1  O---O---O---O---O---O---O---O---O    White O  22 left  taken 0
       a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i

In a terminal the cursor walks the stones that can move. With one picked up,
the arrow keys walk the points it may step to, in all eight directions, and
the board shows the position as the move would leave it before the move is
played.

The three traditional boards are here by name: sivy, nine by five; dimy, five
by five; and telo, three by three.

The game has no single rule book. Game::Fanorona says which texts these rules
were taken from and which four things this distribution had to choose: that a
side with no move has lost, that the third occurrence of a position is a
draw, that sixty moves running with nothing taken is a draw, and how the two
smaller boards are set up.

The engine is C, with no floating point in it. The opponent is bounded by the
number of positions it may look at and never by the clock, so it makes the
same move on every machine.


INSTALLATION

A C compiler is needed. To install this module, run the following commands:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

It requires Object::Proto::Sugar, and perl 5.14 or later. Term::ReadKey is
recommended: with it the terminal program is played with the arrow keys, and
without it by typing.


SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the
perldoc command.

    perldoc Game::Fanorona
    perldoc fanorona

You can also look for information at:

    RT, CPAN's request tracker (report bugs here)
        https://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Game-Fanorona

    Search CPAN
        https://metacpan.org/release/Game-Fanorona


LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This software is Copyright (c) 2026 by LNATION <email@lnation.org>.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)