Halma

Halma is a Macintosh implementation of the 19th-century strategy board game of the same name, in which players race to transfer their pieces from one corner of a checkered board into the opposing corner. The Mac version preserves the abstract, jump-and-step gameplay that has kept Halma in print since the 1880s.

About the original game

Halma was invented in 1883 or 1884 by George Howard Monks, an American thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School. Its name comes from the Greek word for "jump," describing the move that lets a piece leap over an adjacent piece (its own or an opponent's) and chain further jumps in a single turn.

Rules at a glance

Two players each control a set of pieces arrayed in opposite corners of a 16x16 board (four players use four corners and smaller armies). Pieces may step one square in any direction or perform chained jumps over neighbours. The first player to move all pieces into the opposing camp wins.

Why it endured on the Mac

Halma's small rule footprint and clear visual state made it a natural fit for early Macintosh programmers exploring two-player turn-based games on a black-and-white screen. It is also the direct ancestor of Stern-Halma, marketed in the United States as Chinese Checkers.

Era and platform

This entry is part of the Classic Mac shareware and freeware tradition of small board-game adaptations distributed through user groups, BBSes, and FTP archives such as Info-Mac and ftp.funet.fi.