In 15-211 ("Fundamental Structures of Computer Science"), which I took freshman year, our final course project was to program an Othello player. Othello is a simple strategy board game which is easy to learn, but can take a while to learn all the strategies. (see Mattel's Othello website if you want to learn the rules).
We held a class tournament in which everyone's Othello players competed against each other in a round-robin style. This was one of the most enjoyable projects I had at CMU, so I spent a lot of time working on it. My program ended up finishing 4th in the tournament.
It's written in Java (all the GUI code was provided by the instructors). If you want to try it out, download the program here: Othello program.
Read the README for instructions on how to run the program (you need a linux computer with java installed. CMU cluster/telnet computers will work).