I started to play Pente when my partner introduced it to me early in our relationship. It's stuck with me for a long time. For such a simple game, it has a lot of diversity and nuance, has punchy, swingy games, and its abstraction is delightful. It is a distant cousin of Go, but is more approachable and understandable on a quick brush.

This game is multiplayer - there is a random queue, but also a code-based system for matchmaking (a la Jackbox Party Games). If you can't find a friend and just want to see the interface, you can open two tabs, enter the same code (or queue) and see the game load on both ends.

My take on Pente reflected my interest in AI systems providing texture and commentary of a game state. Here, there is a narrator that looks at the state of the game and provides a variety of statements based on who is winning, what the last move resulted in, and so on. The narrator is hand-authored (this was before the advent of public LLMs), and plays with the game's sense of abstraction to give metaphors to how the game would be played. I wanted to use an abstract game to show what analogies hide under the surface of games, and how the texture of game systems and gameplay tell stories in and of themselves.