Banachan

Banachan is an obscure Macintosh tiling puzzle by Japanese shareware author RoboDog. The objective is to slide tiles around a small board until you can simultaneously form a circle of four tiles and a line of three tiles, with helper buttons available to automate stretches of repetitive movement.

The Puzzle

Banachan sits in the same family as sliding-block and pattern-matching puzzles popular on the Mac in the late 1990s. Rather than a single target shape, the goal state is a compound geometric arrangement: the player must position one set of tiles into a four-piece circle while another forms a three-piece line at the same time, which forces planning across two overlapping objectives.

Automation Helpers

Recognizing how repetitive single-step tile shuffling can become, the author included "command buttons for automatic movement of tiles." These shortcuts perform multi-step moves at once, letting the player concentrate on strategy rather than mechanical execution and giving Banachan a distinctly more relaxed feel than pure sliding-puzzle games.

Origin and Distribution

The game was submitted to the Info-Mac archive by RoboDog (robodog@geocities.co.jp), one of many small Japanese shareware authors who used GeoCities Japan as a distribution point in the late 1990s. The Info-Mac entry banachan-10.hqx preserves the only English-language record of the title.