Pentago Master

Enes Işık

About this game

Pentago is a two-player abstract strategy game invented by Tomas Flodén.

The game is played on a 6×6 board divided into four 3×3 sub-boards (or quadrants). Taking turns, the two players place a marble of their color (either black or white) onto an unoccupied space on the board, and then rotate one of the sub-boards by 90 degrees either clockwise or anti-clockwise. This is optional at the beginning of the game, up until every sub-board no longer has rotational symmetry, at which point it becomes mandatory (this is because until then, a player could rotate an empty sub-board or one with just a marble in the middle, either of which has no real effect). A player wins by getting five of their marbles in a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal row (either before or after the sub-board rotation in their move). If all 36 spaces on the board are occupied without a row of five being formed then the game is a draw.

Some tournaments may use special rules. In Pentago Master, you can adjust the gameplay style from the settings menu to match these special tournament rules, allowing you to experience a format closer to official competitions.

You can play singleplayer with bot, local multiplayer with your friend or online multiplayer in Pentago Master.

Ratings and reviews

I like the game and haven't found any other app versions of it yet, but the single player mode needs more difficulty levels, and the online multiplayer doesn't have enough users yet to ever get past the "waiting for opponent" and thus would benefit from adding some kind of game lobby to see who else is online or an option to play correspondence matches like in chess apps.

Ok app. Experienced some bugs where the game merged their marble into mine (leading to a multicolored marble on the board) which prevented me from winning. The AI is not difficult enough once you get the hang of it and there are some QOL improvements needed such as letting players confirm their marble placement before rotation in case of a misclick. aside from that it does the job adequately if you are playing someone in person.

This app works great for local multiplayer, but the AI isn't smart enough to really play a good game against.

What’s new

Penta-chan is now much smarter! The AI has been significantly improved.

Penta-chan can now speak multiple languages! Multi-language support has been added.