THE GAME
Below is the PDF of the game board, the game rules, & two versions of an optional score sheet. Because the color of the game pieces is specified as being either black or white, I like to print out the game board on some contrasting color card-stock for visual interest. You may want, or indeed, need to get innovative, and make the game pieces 22 green and 22 purple, or 22 blue and 22 red, and print out the game board on white card stock. Ideally, the color of your two opposing sets of game pieces should be opposite each other on the color wheel. It’ll depend on what you have on hand. I like to use the flat-bottomed glass beads they sell at craft stores for the game pieces. If you enjoy the game, know you’ll be using it repeatedly, and have any talent for woodcraft & woodburning, you might even want to make a wooden game board version, in which case this download could be used as a pattern.
Though it’s a game of combat, my source says it is not a game of skill like chess, Stratego™, or even Nine Men’s Morris. That’s a frustrating reality for the player who enjoys an intellectual challenge in their game-play, but it points up the reality that Fanorona was not designed to be a game of skill. It was designed to be played for divinatory and symbolic purposes. It may even have been used as a teaching tool for the young, as a lesson in the reality that the struggle between polar opposites is never-ending.
Though it was established as a win-or-lose game, and in that sense was considered predictive—one party wins, the other loses–the remaining pieces on the board were also studied, because it was believed the pattern of the remaining pieces on the board conveyed a divinatory message. I encourage you to feel free to draw on your own knowledge when interpreting the remaining game pieces. Do they resemble a rune or an ogham? Do they look like a punctuation mark? A flow-chart symbol? A basic shape? A letter? If you decide to use the score sheet I devised, you may want to draw a small diagram of the remaining game pieces on the board in the empty space after the victor’s name for each round. You may find when the game is done they spell-out a message, if only symbolic.
As in chess, in Fanarona, white moves first, moving one game piece to the center of the game board, the foibeny or navel, thus throwing the universe out of balance. Black then moves a game piece, and black’s move must be in such a way that they capture opposing pieces, or moves in that direction. Play continues back and forth, each player moving in such a way that they capture their opponent’s game pieces, until one player has lost all their game pieces. The victor’s remaining pieces are then sometimes studied for the pattern in which they sit on the board for some sort of symbolic message.
The game board is then set up for the second round. The second round, called the vela round, is played according to distinctly different rules from the first round. For starters, the loser from the first round starts play, moving one of their game pieces to the foibeny. The winner of the previous round has to deliberately lose seventeen game pieces to their opponent before they can start capturing their opponent’s game pieces. Given the odds in the first-round loser’s favor, it’s likely they’ll win the second round of the game, but not guaranteed.
The third round of the game is played according to standard rules, then the fourth game according to vela rules, and so on. My source doesn’t say there’s a minimum or maximum limit to the number of rounds the players can play. They could choose to play one round and call it good, or they could play forty. It’s up to the players. But since this is a divinatory game, certainly after several rounds, it should be plain whom the winds of fortune are favoring. I designed both versions of the score sheet for fifteen rounds of the game, but that’s an arbitrary number. You can play more or fewer. I also recommend doing a diagram of the remaining game pieces on the board before you set up for the next round, because the configuration could mean something important.