I PLAY A SET OF FANORONA
I didn’t enter this with a question I wanted answered; I just wanted to get some practice with the game. I played both sides myself. I was a ruthless and at times baffled opponent. Black was particularly aggressive. If you can’t find a participant, you could potentially play this game by yourself, but of course it is best that you have an opponent, two heads being better than one. During play, it was obvious this game is more akin to checkers than chess, the difference being that in Fanorona, when you take an opponent’s game piece, you take all their game pieces in that same row. Think of it as a fast-paced, more cut-throat form of checkers. If you place two rows of your opponent’s game pieces in jeopardy by such a move, you may only confiscate one row’s game pieces.
The rules don’t make it clear, so I came up with a rule on the spot: if you need to move a piece backward a space, or at a diagonal in order to avoid the danger of immediate capture, you may do so. The intent is to keep that game piece in play so that it has the chance to capture the opponent’s game pieces. Just keep in mind the game board is only so big, and play goes fast, so soon white will capture black, or black will capture white. But there’s no need to make it easy for your opponent.
I don’t completely agree with the source material that there’s no skill involved; you’re making constant value judgements and looking for where your game pieces are in danger and acting accordingly. But I think the intent with this game is that you play it quickly, almost mindlessly, so that the essential message behind it can come through.
I recommend you practice this game a little, and commit the rules to memory, because you want to get to a point where you don’t think about your moves in Fanorona, you just instinctively make them. Speed is important in this game, because it is the result of each round that counts, not skillful-play. Speedy-play will give you unconscious and thus accurate results. Personally, I found the standard rounds seemed to go faster than the vela rounds.
After each round of play, I made a rough sketch of where the remaining game pieces on the board were. When I had finished the fifteen rounds the score sheet allows, I tallied-up the wins and losses—white won nine rounds, black won six. Then I looked at my diagrams to see if their basic shapes reminded me of anything.