Editing Pentomino (section)

=== Commercial board games ===

There are [[board game]]s of skill based entirely on pentominoes. Such games are often simply called "Pentominoes".

One of the games is played on an 8×8 grid by two or three players. Players take turns in placing pentominoes on the board so that they do not overlap with existing tiles and no tile is used more than once. The objective is to be the last player to place a tile on the board. This version of Pentominoes is called "Golomb's Game".{{sfnp|Pritchard|1982|p=83}}

The two-player version has been [[solved board games|weakly solved]] in 1996 by Hilarie Orman. It was proved to be a first-player win by examining around 22 billion board positions.<ref>Hilarie K. Orman. [http://www.msri.org/publications/books/Book29/files/orman.pdf Pentominoes: A First Player Win] (Pdf).</ref>

Pentominoes, and similar shapes, are also the basis of a number of other tiling games, patterns and puzzles. For example, the French board game ''[[Blokus]]'' is played with 4 colored sets of [[polyominoes]], each consisting of every pentomino (12), tetromino (5), triomino (2) domino (1) and monomino (1). Like the game ''Pentominoes'', the goal is to use all of your tiles, and a bonus is given if the monomino is played on the last move. The player with the fewest blocks remaining wins.

The game of ''[[Cathedral (board game)|Cathedral]]'' is also based on [[polyominoes]].<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.cathedral-game.co.nz/hints.htm| title = FAQ}}</ref>

[[Parker Brothers]] released a multi-player pentomino board game called ''Universe'' in 1966. Its theme is based on a deleted scene from the 1968 film ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey (film)|2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' in which an astronaut is playing a two-player pentomino game against the [[HAL 9000|HAL 9000 computer]] ([[Poole versus HAL 9000|a scene with a different astronaut playing chess]] was retained). The front of the board game box features scenes from the movie as well as a caption describing it as the "game of the future". The game comes with four sets of pentominoes in red, yellow, blue, and white. The board has two playable areas: a base 10x10 area for two players with an additional 25 squares (two more rows of 10 and one offset row of five) on each side for more than two players.

Game manufacturer [[Lonpos]] has a number of games that use the same pentominoes, but on different game planes. Their ''101 Game'' has a 5 x 11 plane. By changing the shape of the plane, thousands of puzzles can be played, although only a relatively small selection of these puzzles are available in print.