Pentad

Pentad is essentially two games in one app: Word Pentad and Poker Pentad.

Both games are for one person as a challenging pastime or for two to four players playing against each other.

Both games are played with 25 tiles. For Word Pentad, the tiles display letters, the 25 tiles being randomly selected from a set of 100 letter tiles, while for Poker Pentad, the tiles represent playing cards taken from a standard pack of 52 cards.

The tiles are supplied to you one at a time, and you must place each tile on a vacant square of the 5x5 Pentad board. After the initial phase of placing the tiles on the board, you then have an opportunity to make some minor adjustments to the layout of the board. You can select two pairs of tiles, in turn, and swap the two tiles in the pair. This not only provides you with an opportunity to increase your score, it also gives you something else to consider and to optimize during the initial positioning phase.

The objectives of the two games are, of course, quite different. For Word Pentad, the objective is to place the tiles so that they form words of two or more letters - either horizontally from left-to-right or vertically from top-to-bottom. The skill comes in how you use these letters to form words and to maximize the points scored. For Poker Pentad, the objective is to form poker hands, horizontally or vertically - a version of Poker Squares

The app is also available from i.compactfun.com if you cannot download from the Play Store. A web-based version that can be played on most browsers is also there.