المباراة
Fanorona
Madagascar's national game, where a piece captures by moving towards a line of enemies — or away from it.
{variant} — the rules
Fanoron-tsivy
The full game on the 5×9 board: twenty-two pieces a side, approach and withdrawal captures, and chains that clear half a rank.
Fanoron-dimyUnrated
The 5×5 teaching board with twelve pieces a side — the same captures, learned in a quarter of the time.
Fanoron-teloUnrated
Three pieces each on a 3×3 grid, played for a line of three; the game a Malagasy child learns before the big board.
In one sentence
Fanorona is played on a lattice of points with a piece on almost every one of them. The centre starts empty, and for the first few moves that single hole is the entire game.
It has no jumping. You capture by approach, stepping towards the enemy line, or by withdrawal, stepping directly away from it, and either way every enemy piece standing in an unbroken row behind the first one is removed. A single move can take five pieces or more.
The result is a game that feels nothing like draughts despite the shared board. Openings are sharp and largely forced, and a player who does not know the first few moves will usually be a dozen pieces down before they understand what happened.