This morning I was browsing one of China’s online shopping sites (because I was bored, I guess) and ran across one of my favorite games, Pentago–or so I thought at first glance. I looked more closely and it turns out to be a bit different. Pentago has four rotatable quadrants, each of which is a 3x3 array. This new-fangled one also has the four 3x3 quadrants, but also an extra line of holes for the marbles in between the rotatable quadrants, the extra lines do not move. So the entire board, instead of being a 6x6 array is a 7x7 array as follows (O = hole on rotatable quadrant; X = hole on non-movable portion of board):
O O O X O O O
O O O X O O O
O O O X O O O
X X X X X X X
O O O X O O O
O O O X O O O
O O O X O O O
Now I know Pentago is a solved game, with first player win. What about this new one? How exctly does this affect the game play compared to the original Pentago?