Jabiru

Jabiru is an obscure French shareware word game in the Mastermind tradition, built for Classic Mac OS by Michel Buttet. Players race to deduce a hidden six-letter French word before the computer guesses theirs, drawing on a dictionary of 25,000 word forms and 5,000 full definitions.

Gameplay

Each round, both you and the Mac pick a secret six-letter word. You take turns guessing, and the game reports how many letters are correct and correctly placed, much like Mastermind. The first to crack the opponent's word wins the round.

Solo and Versus Modes

Jabiru supports both solo play, where you puzzle through words at your own pace, and head-to-head matches against the Mac's solver. The bundled definitions also let it double as a small reference, surfacing meanings for the words encountered during play.

Distribution

Released as shareware at 30 French francs (about US$5), Jabiru reached version 2.1 by the late 1990s and required a 68040 or better, System 7, 1.5 MB of RAM, and 2.5 MB of disk space. It remains preserved through Info-Mac as a small but well-crafted Francophone puzzle title.