Achi

Achi is a freeware Macintosh implementation of the West African strategy game of the same name, written in 1992 by an author posting from Tulane University (PC0TMYS@MUSIC.TCS.TULANE.EDU). The program is 32-bit clean, runs on any Macintosh with at least 230K of free memory, and supports both human-vs-human and human-vs-computer play.

The game itself

Achi is a traditional Ghanaian board game closely related to tic-tac-toe. Each player begins by placing four pieces on a 3x3 grid of points connected by lines; once all pieces are down, players take turns sliding a single piece along a line to an adjacent empty point, trying to form three in a row.

Mac implementation

The Mac version was distributed on June 12, 1992 as a StuffIt 1.5.1 archive containing the application and a Read Me file. Documentation is available both inside the program (online help) and as a separate text file. The compact 230K memory footprint kept it usable on 1MB compact Macs of the era.

Licensing and distribution

The author released Achi as freeware with no shareware notices or fees, and it was filed in the Info-Mac game/brd subdirectory as achi.hqx, where it remains preserved today.

Preservation

Macintosh Garden hosts a screenshot of the game showing the small 3x3 board layout, providing one of the few surviving visual records of this otherwise minimal application.