Publisher's blurb This article describes a game with fairly simple rules which is surprisingly non-trivial. The game is called The French Military Game, or FMG for short. User summary The French Military Game first was published and analyzed as a mathematical problem by Martin Gardner in The Sixth Book of Mathematical Games (Scientific American, 1975). This version of the game finds black played by the computer. It was written by Gerald H. Herd and published as type-in source code in Creative Computing Vol. 5, No. 9, September 1979.