We played this game a lot in school, on the cross-section paper we used in math. We called it Dodelschach (Idiot's Chess). Whoever gets a previously agreed upon number in a row first wins. Diagonals count. The classic number is five, higher number make for longer and often more interesting games. In most computer conversions it is five.
I was a bit astonished when I learned far later that what I had
known as Idiot's Chess is a venerable game that goes by the name
of Gomoku, or sometimes Gobang. It is traditionally played with a
Go board and pieces, and can be tracked down at least to 700 AD.
It is a common phenomenon to have a light, recreational game played
with the hardware
of a more complex
one.
The game of Pachisi, for example, is
such a lite
version of the more complex Chaupar, and in the
chess culture there is something known as suicide chess, where the
goal is to get rid of all your pieces (which move just like in the
regular game) first.
A variant of Gomoku is Renju, which introduces a few additional rules designed to balance it out better. Like Gomoku itself, Renju is a traditional game. Some computer implementations allow you to play by either rules, but in general Renju has been far less popular with programmers.
Somewhat similar to Gomoku is Connect Four, where the pieces are not put on a board, but dropped into columns from above. Finally there is the Parker Brothers game Pente, actually Ninuki-Renju, which combines Gomoku with some aspects of Othello.
| Turbo-Gomoku | |
85 | |
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| Gobang | |
86 | |
Mark Overmars | ||||
| Go-Moku | |
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| Block Five | |
89 | |
Scott Miller | ||||
| WMAKE5 | |
92 | |
Chih-Hung Hsieh | ||||
| 0X | |
93 | |
Pentti Moilanen | ||||
| Five in a Row | |
|
Sverre H. Huseby | |||||
| Piskvorky | |
|
Martin Kuzela | |||||
| Gomoku | |
94 | XY Consulting | |||||
| Renju | |
|
Adrian Millett | |||||
| Caro | |
95 | |
Thu Nguyen | ||||
| Win-Gomoku | |
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Valér Čanda | |||||
| Randzu | |
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| Go Moku | |
96 | |
Blazej Stompel | ||||
| Crazy Gomoku | |
|
Josef Stöckl | |||||
| Go-Moku Headache | |
|
Aleksander Kelsin, Primož Plesec | |||||
| Rendzu 2.0 | |
|
Vadim Miller | |||||
| Go-Moku 95 | |
97 | |
Stanislav Drapkin | ||||
| Get 5 | |
98 | |
Klaus Tadsen | ||||
| Confaive | |
99 | |
Dominik Kaspar | ||||
| Pisqorky | |
|
Martin Schmidt | |||||
| FiveStones | |
|
Alexander S. Kresin | |||||
| Krestiki-Noliki | |
|
Alexey Tokarev | |||||
| XO | |
|
Steffen Gerlach | |||||
| OmaMoku | |
|
Kari Kulmala | |||||
| XO Tactics | |
01 | |
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| Carbon Gomoku | |
02 | |
Michal Czardybon |
Gomoku games have primarily been popular on the PC, and were nearly always freeware or published in compilations. An interesting detail is that as a rule European developers tend to emulate the look of noughts and crosses on cross-section paper, while US developers prefer the look of a Go board.
There are a couple of Gomoku and Renju arcade machines, though not very many, and I don't think any of them have ever been released outside Japan. The only one I have currently screenshots of is Renju Kizoku by Visco, 1994.
