Pentaquark

Here we have another little gem from Button Shy games, this time for all the solo players out there.

Pentaquark, another wallet game beautifully executed and really good fun, and it will make you look like you understand particle physics.

As per the other games in the wallet series, it has 18 cards and you don't need to provide anything extra.

You are in charge of a hadron collider and you are trying to contain quarks to form a pentaquark.
Right, don't worry you won't need to spend hours studying particle physics, the game is actually based on simple logic.

But what is a Pentaquark?

From good old wikipedia:
"A pentaquark is a subatomic particle consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together."

And that is exactly what you are trying to create, something like the following:

Up, Up, Down, Charm and Anti-charm which is the same sequence you see on the cover of the game.

Keep in mind that there are not many possible combinations to achieve your goal, so make sure you are always working towards a currently achievable set.

Each card depicts a colour and a quark on one side and its anti-colour and anti-quark on the other side.

Each turn you'll need to make decisions on which quarks to keep, which ones to discard and have them available on their opposite side in the following turn, and which ones to destroy.
You'll need to be quick and clever to manage to keep as many cards as you can in play because each time you deplete the deck, you'll need to introduce an Annihilate card which, when in play, will force you to destroy an available free quark aka a card.

The core of the game is in the colour confinement rules and keeping track of which cards will flip the next round as well as managing to keep extra cards to sacrifice when required, a perfect mixture for a challenging puzzle game.

So, what is colour confinement?

Colour confinement is a way to group quarks together. You have 2 ways of doing so:

1. You can create a triplet of quarks (Baryons) each of one of the basic colours or anti-colours (Red, Blue and Green  or Anti-red, Anti-blue and Anti-green)
2. Or a tuple of quarks (Mesons) using a colour and its anti-colour (Red and Anti-red, Blue and Anti-blue, Green and Anti-green)

These simple confinement rules will keep your brain churning, working out the best combinations to increase your chances to create a Pentaquark or to save the most cards possible to be able to gain more time to solve the puzzle.

I have to say that for the first few plays I wasn't completely clear on what the aim of the game was and I was not following any specific strategy. I suggest you study the cards before you start playing and manually put together one of the winning sets providing you with clues on how to optimise your decisions.

Impressive little puzzle game that you can easily use to fill up daily downtime. It doesn't take more than 15 minutes to play and has a small footprint.

Wanna more details? watch this video review: