Pente(6) Pente(6)
30 November 1997
NAME
pente - Game of five in a row
SYNOPSIS
pente -help pente [ <options> ]
HOW TO PLAY PENTE
Pente is the American name of a Japanese game called ``ni-nuki'',
which is a variant of the ancient game ``go-moku''. Pente is played
on a 19x19 grid with stones of two different colors. Each player
chooses one set of stones; then the players take turns placing their
stones on any unoccupied intersection until one player wins. There
are two ways to win. If a player makes five or more stones in a
straight line (across, down, or diagonally), then that player wins.
Or, if a player captures five pairs of his or her opponent's stones,
that player also wins. Stones may be captured in pairs only. To
capture a pair of stones, a player must place one stone on either side
of the pair. The first move is placed in the center of the board. To
make up for the advantage of going first, the first player's second
move must be at least three spaces from their first. This sounds
confusing, so don't worry about it; just play, and if the computer
won't let you move where you want on your second move, play somewhere
farther away. That's it! There directions are pretty terse, but if
you have an X display there are better directions available through
the ``help'' button. You can also try playing a few games; the rules
are simple enough that you can pick them up easily just by playing.
THE PROGRAM
This program has support for many different display types. Depending
on the compile options used, X Windows, Curses, and a plain text
format may be available. The exact display type used will be chosen
by the program, or it may be selected with a command line switch.
Information on the switches is available with pente -help. Most of
the command line switches can also be set with the ``setup'' window of
the X interface. Any changes you make there will be saved in the
.pente.ad file and remembered the next time that you play. You can
also set any of the command line switches can be set with an X
default. For example, if you want to set black and white to be the
default mode, you can run pente with pente -nocolor, or you can add
pente*color: 0 to your X defaults, or you can just turn off color in
the ``setup'' window. Pente will store a new .pente.ad file every
time you run it. In this file it will save the current state of
Pente. This is handy; you don't normally have to set command line
switches since Pente will remember them in the .pente.ad file.
BUGS
Sometimes the .pente.ad file gets some bad data in it. Just delete
the file and then you can start from scratch again.
AUTHOR
Bill Shubert (wms@hevanet.com) French text by Eric Dupas (dupas@univ-
- 1 - Formatted: April 20, 2024
Pente(6) Pente(6)
30 November 1997
mlv.fr) Italian text by Andrea Borgia (email: borgia@cs.unibo.it;
homepage: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~borgia)
- 2 - Formatted: April 20, 2024
