| Box cover from a vintage copy from the 1920s | |
| Publishers | Parker Brothers |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1925 |
| Players | 2-4 |
| Playing time | 20 minutes |
| Age range | 12+ |
Pegity (originally titled Peg'ity) is a strategic board game originally published by Parker Brothers in 1925 that is similar to Gomoku.
Peg'ity, an abstract strategy game in which players attempt to create a line of markers, is a predecessor of the more recent game Connect 4 . [1]
To begin play, the first player places one of their coloured pegs in any hole in the pegboard. Play passes to each player in turn, one peg being placed per turn. Each player attempts to place five of their pegs in a straight line in adjacent holes either horizontally, vertically or diagonally. At the same time, players try to prevent other players from achieving the same threshold by placing one of their own pegs at one end of an opponent's line of pegs while it still has only three pegs or fewer. Then if the player with three in a row places a fourth, any player can completely block five in a row by placing their peg at the other end of the four. [2] [3]
The game also includes patterns for creating designs on the game board as an alternative to playing the game for children too young to play the game. [3]
Parker Brothers introduced the game in 1925, [4] and continued to produce it through the 1960s.
Copies of Peg'ity are held in the collections of several museums:
In the paper Adversary Problem Solving by Humans, Dennis H. Holding examines several studies that have used Peg'ity to study memory encoding as it relates to developing effective strategies in adversarial board games. [7]
In the August 1971 edition of Scientific American , Martin Gardner examines the mathematics and strategies of gomuku, "sold in the U.S. by Parker Brothers under the name Pegity." [8]
Gomoku, also called Five in a Row, is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces on a Go board. It is played using a 15×15 board while in the past a 19×19 board was standard. Because pieces are typically not moved or removed from the board, gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names.
Derived from the Greek word for '5', and "domino", a pentomino is a polyomino of order 5, that is, a polygon in the plane made of 5 equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge. When rotations and reflections are not considered to be distinct shapes, there are 12 different free pentominoes. When reflections are considered distinct, there are 18 one-sided pentominoes. When rotations are also considered distinct, there are 63 fixed pentominoes.
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