Very Briefly

Do you love science, perhaps even particle physics in particular?

Do you love short yet challenging set-collection games with a well-developed arc that keeps you interested from start to finish?

Then Pentaquark (Mike Mullins) is for you!

Briefly

  • There are five quark types in the game (up, down, bottom, strange, and charm), each in three different colors (red, green, and blue). Yes, these are all real things in quantum chromodynamics, and yes, it is a shame that neither the truth nor beauty quarks could make it in!
  • As quark particles pass through the beam, it’s up to you to capture particles into sets – a process called confinement – and manipulate your sets into the solution (a group of two sets called the Pentaquark) to win the game.
  • Putting the wrong particles into the same location outside of the beam (either the background or the detector areas) can result in them annihilating each other, removing themselves from the game and making your job that much harder.
  • With every reshuffle, an additional event card is added each time that, when shown, will annihilate any particles you’ve not yet confined in temporary or final sets – providing a nice push of momentum throughout the game.
  • Clever play will get you the win more often than not, and Pentaquark is quite a nice puzzler.

Expansions

The expansions aren’t necessary as the base game is extremely enjoyable all on its own. However, each expansion does add extra variety and spice to your particle experiments!

QCD Pack 1: Top Quarks

The most straightforward of the expansions, this adds the top quark in red, green, and blue to the mix! Top quarks act a little differently – unlike other quarks which will stay around even as singletons until they’re annihilated by something else, top quarks will discard themselves if you don’t confine them the moment you get them out of the beam.

This gives the player an advantage: top quarks cannot be removed from the game by the annihilate event cards, and thus you have an extra three cards of padding to give you a little breathing room to get your Pentaquark together.

This expansion can be enjoyed at any level of experience.

QCD Pack 2: Bosons

Bosons add a new event card type to the game that are added in a way similar to the original annihilate event cards – after each reshuffle of the deck.

When boson cards appear in the beam, they’ll change the quark type of any unconfined, free quark still floating around in the background or detector areas. This can be very useful if you’ve, say, accidentally annihilated all your charm quarks and otherwise couldn’t get a Pentaquark in the end.

This expansion is one for advanced players, as the assistance it does offer takes finesse to pull off.

QCD Pack 3: Gluons

Gluons are very similar to the bosons, except this time they’ll change the color of unconfined quarks still floating in the background or detector areas. Likewise, they can save your skin if you’ve somehow lost your red down quark and you really need a blue one to complete your Pentaquark.

This expansion is also for advanced players, but I personally found gluons easier to mentally come to grips with than bosons, though I do love both expansions.

The Colliders

There are now a total of six collider cards, which are single cards you can add individually to the set up of a game of Pentaquark to change some of the rules, making things harder or easier for you. I especially like the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider Beauty), because it gives you a new win condition instead of the Pentaquark – a Tetraquark.

I do find the colliders to be best used in the Pentaquark campaign mode, however, which combines everything into a story about the little particle physics lab that could.

The Pentaquark Campaign Mode

The Pentaquark Campaign Mode is a print-and-play mode by the designer created to celebrate one of the multiple reprints of this wonderful little game.

During a run of this campaign, you will use every expansion (all of which are included in the print-and-play for free) as you run through different experiments (guided by a specific collider with particular win conditions listed in the campaign table) and try not to run out of funding by succeeding more often than not.

It’s tricky to keep going but you can do it if you use the abilities to recharge (bring previously annihilated particles back into the campaign game) and recalibrate (temporarily remove an annihilate card from the deck) wisely.

This campaign, like Pentaquark itself, is difficult but very fun!

If you want the campaign to be a little easier than Fate potentially just dropping a single boson on your head in Phase 1, pick CMS to be your first experiment, and choose the others randomly as per usual. CMS will give you access to the Top quarks for the rest of the campaign.

A Pentaquark Filk1

Charm quarks and down quarks
     and trios of color;
Herding these particles
     annihilating one another;
Sets that obey quantum
     chromodynamic laws;
That’s why Pentaquark has
     so very few flaws!

  1. A “filk” song is a portmanteau of “fan” and “folk” – a fan folk song. ↩