Pentago
Jul 2, 2015Pentago is a favorite board game of mine, which I used to play regularly with coworkers during lunch (and occasionally during not-lunch). The rules are very simple, and casual games can be played in just a few minutes, but it’s deep enough to still be satisfying if you’re willing to put some thought into your strategy.
In 2009 I wrote a computer player for Pentago in C#, and even managed to cobble together Silverlight and Windows Phone UIs for it that aren’t terrible. The engine uses a negamax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning.
I put the engine up on Codeplex a long time ago, but never thought to publish the UI projects. This week I moved the whole thing to GitHub (UI projects included) and made sure it builds and runs with VS 2015.
Things I hope to find time/motivation for in the not-too-distant future:
- Re-implement the engine in F#, with various performance and design improvements
- Publish the phone version
- Make an HTML/JS front-end
In the meantime, here’s the Silverlight version to play with! [Note that if you’re using Chrome you’ll need to take extra steps to enable Silverlight.]