Pente

Pente is a shareware Macintosh implementation of the classic board game Pente, submitted to Info-Mac in December 1992 by Michael A. Black. Players win by lining up five of their stones in a row or by capturing five pairs of opposing stones, and the Mac version offers three modes of play across three difficulty levels.

Rules in brief

Pente was designed in 1977 by Gary Gabrel and takes its name from the Greek word for five. Stones are placed on the intersections of a grid, and a pair of adjacent stones is captured when flanked on both sides by the opposing color.

What the Mac shareware adds

This version implements the standard Pente rules and adds three modes of play together with three selectable difficulty levels, making it suitable for both casual and more deliberate matches against the computer.

Two paths to victory

A game ends when a player either aligns five or more of their own stones in any direction or captures five pairs of the opponent's stones, so aggressive flanking play and defensive blocking are both viable strategies.

Distribution

The game was submitted to the Info-Mac archive in 1992 (game/brd category) as a BinHex 4.0 file by Michael A. Black (blackm@ecn.purdue.edu).