Twelve Men’s Morris is a classic strategy game from the family of Morris games that has been played since at least 1400 BC. It’s not played very frequently any more, perhaps because the game is not terribly exciting to our modern tastes. For those who have not been exposed to the game (it can be found in many children’s game books), one player takes twelve white stones, the other black. Players take turns placing one of their twelve stones on unoccupied nodes of a board. Once a player’s supply of stones is depleted, each turn consists of sliding one of his stones to an empty, adjacent node.
Whenever a player’s move creates a three-in-a-row of his color, he earns the right to remove one opponent’s stone from the board and throw it out of the game. The game ends when one opponent is reduced to two stones, or is unable to move.
Pentagonia is, plain and simple, Fifteen Men’s Morris. The Twelve Men’s Morris board has been extrapolated from a rectangular network of 3x3 grids to a pentagonal layout of 3x3 grids. This adds six more spaces to the board, and therefore, each player starts with three additional pieces. The rules are the same, with one exception that I’ll discuss in a moment.
In my opinion, the six additional spaces and pieces do not add any significant complexity or depth, they merely lengthen the game a bit. So why buy Pentagonia? I’m not sure.
To their credit, the designers of Pentagonia did add one rule that helps to even out the huge advantage that the first player has in all the Morris games. When a player has been reduced to five pieces, he gains the powerful ability to move his piece to any unoccupied space on the board, and is no longer limited to sliding to adjacent spaces. This potentially allows the losing player to make a comeback, and forces the winning player to cautiously reduce his vulnerabilities before plunging into the endgame.
Pentagonia is a decent remake of a game that has stood the test of time, but there’s really very little new here.