Hi all! I'm a long-time lurker but this is my first time posting.
For a while now, I've been tinkering with a Gomoku (Five-in-a-Row) game for PICO-8 with a basic but entertaining AI player.
I'm quite a fan of the Gomoku Narabe Renju game for Famicom (essentially the same game with slightly more complex rules), and originally, I started out to make a version of that. But as usual, it was becoming larger in scope than I was comfortable with. So to actually make progress I decided to simplify things a lot.
Ultimately, this version is a regular game of Gomoku that uses the Long Pro opening rule and requires exactly five stones in a row to win (ignoring six or more in a row). Each game consists of a tournament with a minimum of five rounds. The winning player is the one with more than two wins over their opponent.
Controls:
Z: Start/Place piece