Pente

Pente is an abstract strategy board game for two or more players, created in 1977 by Gary Gabrel. A member of the m,n,k game family, Pente stands out for its custodial capture mechanic, which allows players to "sandwich" pairs of stones and capture them by flanking them on either side. This changes the overall tactical assessments players face when compared to pure placement m,n,k games such as Gomoku.

Rules

Pente is played on a 19x19 grid of intersections similar to a Go board. Players alternate placing stones of their color on empty intersections, with White always assuming the opening move. The goal of the game is to either align five or more stones of the same color in a row in any vertical, horizontal or diagonal direction or to make five captures.
Stones are captured by custodial capture. Captures consist of exactly two stones; flanking a single stone or three or more stones does not result in a capture. As an example, if the stones are ⚫⚪⚪▁ and Black places their stone so it becomes ⚫⚪⚪⚫, then White's pair is removed from the board, leaving ⚫▁▁⚫.
A stone may legally be placed on any empty intersection, even if it forms a pair between two enemy stones. If the stones are placed ⚫⚪▁⚫, then White may place their stone so it becomes ⚫⚪⚪⚫. The pair is not captured in this case.
A player wins if they capture ten or more stones.

History

Invention

Gary Gabrel invented Pente while working as a dishwasher at Hideaway Pizza, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He took the job while in college at Oklahoma State University to pay room and board, and would play games there with his coworkers, such as Go, Checkers, and the Gomoku family of games. The latter in particular stood out to him, and he noted that it had all the qualities necessary to make a great product. Gabrel, taking the features that appealed to him, used them to invent Pente, increasing the board size, reducing the complexity, and speeding up the game to "fit the western lifestyle."
Ninuki-Renju, the variant from the Gomoku family of games most similar to Pente, is played on the intersections of a 15x15 board with black and white stones. It allows captures of pairs like Pente but has complex opening rules and first player restrictions, such as requiring exactly five stones in a row to win, and restricting the first player from forming open double threes.
Hoping to secure publisher backing, Gabrel sent his new ruleset to ten different companies but was rejected by all of them. Gabrel describes the experience of approaching prospective partners:

I went to the very few acquaintances I had, but they all rejected my propositions because they didn't understand the premise of the game, and they didn't have any respect for me as a prospective professional.

He continued looking for a partner who had both experience and the funds to launch his product, and found someone listed in the phone book as an "inventor". The man already had a project to which he was committed but agreed to help Gabrel. Together they applied for a copyright and had two hundred copies of the game made. Looking for a name, they settled on "Pente", from the Greek word for "five", a reference to the win conditions of getting five in a row or making five captures. They avoided an "oriental"-sounding name despite the inspiration from Go and Gomoku, because according to Gabrel, feelings about the Vietnam War were still "running high."
In 1978, Gabrel, now a manager, intended to quit his job at Hideaway Pizza and devote his time exclusively to Pente, but his partner expressed doubts, saying "the world wasn't ready for Pente." Gabrel's bank rejected his request for a loan several times. He eventually secured a small loan from a different bank and borrowed money from his family, using it to buy out his partner and make a down payment on a GMC van to travel around selling copies of the game.
He traveled across the Southwest, staying a few days each in towns and cities in the area, selling and teaching Pente to gift-store owners, club owners, and reporters. The money gained in each town was usually enough to allow him to continue for a few weeks at a time. Through 1978 and the first half of 1979, Gabrel sold around five thousand Pente sets, with the game being played in several popular clubs in Oklahoma City. Gabrel himself was featured in newspapers across the state.

Pente Games Inc.

While successful, by the second half of 1979, Gabrel was worried that he would not be able to secure the financing needed to take advantage of the growth opportunities that Pente's popularity was making possible.
He decided to incorporate his Pente business as Pente Games Inc. and secured financing from Dr. Lee Centraccos and his wife, Cookie Centraccos, both of whom had previous experience in the restaurant industry and cable television, and agreed to give Gabrel cash and a $100,000 line of credit in return for twenty percent of the equity in Pente games, a share of the profit, and a position on the company's board of directors.
With funding secured, Pente Games Inc. and Gabrel pursued what they called "the backgammon example", which involved promoting Pente as a fashionable and prestigious game and selling it for seventeen dollars to support its upscale image. Their target demographic was eighteen- to thirty-five–year-old young professionals who were "upscale and fashion conscious." They avoided mass merchandisers to avoid both the complexities of going through buyers in different parts of the country and competing with Monopoly and Risk on the shelves, targeting local and regional gift and department stores instead.
To save money, Gabrel packaged Pente in roll-up vinyl tubes instead of boxes, which made stocking the games on standard shelving more difficult for stores but also stood out visually and distinguished the game from other products on the market.
In the fall of 1979, Pente was picked up by John A. Brown, an Oklahoma department store, and sold twenty thousand sets during the Christmas season. In its first full year in business, Pente Games Inc. sold one hundred thousand sets, and by the end of the second year had sold three hundred thousand.
By 1983, Pente had become popular enough that it was being called "the backgammon of the '80s" and President Ronald Reagan and Hugh Hefner were both said to own sets.
In 1983, an article in the Soviet gaming magazine Игра и логика claimed a variant of Pente had independently emerged among mathematics students at Leningrad State University. This version, called “Pyatka”, supposedly featured a modified rule where captures could only occur diagonally, and players had to complete both a five-in-a-row and three successful captures to win. No other references to this variant are known and some researchers believe the story was a satirical fabrication aimed at Western abstract games.

Sale to Parker Brothers

On July 2, 1983, Gary Gabrel sold Pente to Parker Brothers for an undisclosed sum. He was adamant that the sale would be the best thing possible for Pente and had assurances from Parker Brothers that the gameplay would not change and that they would continue to fund tournaments and promote the game. The hope was that Pente would move from being a popular new game to the status of a "true classic".
Despite promises to continue to promote Pente as heavily as Gabrel and Pente Games Inc. had, the year after the purchase of Pente, Parker Brothers failed to hold the 1984 championship tournament.

Present

Currently, Pente is a registered trademark of Hasbro for strategy-game equipment. While Hasbro ceased distribution of Pente in 1993, it later licensed the name to Winning Moves Games USA, a classic games publisher that resurrected the game in 2004. The 2004 version includes four extra stones, called power stones, that can be played in the Pente Plus version.

Professional play

The now-defunct United States Pente Association was formed in 1982 to "further the communication of Pente players throughout the world" and "assist the growth of Pente enjoyment." It organized in-person tournaments, held postal tournaments through the mail, kept an up-to-date list of player ratings, and released a quarterly newsletter discussing Pente news, problems, and games, among other things.
Pente tournament play is governed in Poland by Polskie Stowarzyszenie Gomoku Renju i Pente jointly with Gomoku and Renju.

First player advantage

Pente, much like Gomoku, is known to favor the first player. The [|Pro Tournament Rule], proposed by Tom Braunlich, was adopted for standard tournament play as an attempt to mitigate this advantage and bring the win ratio at high-level play closer to around fifty percent, as is roughly the case in casual play. Analysis of approximately seven hundred fifty thousand games played online at Pente.org bears this out, demonstrating a bias of about fifty-three percent across all games and skill levels.
Further analysis showed that when timeouts are excluded and games are filtered out if either player's rating is below 1800 Elo, the first player advantage increases from about 53% to about 58%. When the results are filtered to exclude games where the players ratings are below 2000 and then 2200 the FPA increases again to 59% and then 60%, respectively.
Rollie Tesh, the 1983 world champion, argued in an interview in 1984 that the Professional Pente tournament rule was not an effective solution and suggested either adopting mitigation rules from professional Renju tournaments, such as move restrictions on the first player known as forbidden moves, or adopting Keryo Pente.
Tournament Gomoku currently uses what is called the swap2 opening, where a player places three stones on any of the intersections of the board. The second player can then either choose to play as white and place the fourth stone, swap colors and control the black stones, or put two more stones and pass the choice of which color to play as to their opponent.
When analyzing tournament data for Gomoku using identical opening rules to Pro Pente, an FPA around sixty-seven percent was calculated. When swap2 was adopted for tournament play, analysis of tournament games showed an FPA drop to about fifty-two percent.
In light of this, the same swap2 opening was adopted for Pente on vint.ee, Board Game Arena, and Pente.org, online gaming websites, as an attempt to mitigate FPA in high-level play.