Gomoku Clones

Commercializing traditional games, which have no copyright, is at the same time less expensive because of the lack of copyright, but also a homage to the public commons and to old cultural traditions.

Gomoku is a traditional game with simple rules, and yet it is deep enough to be quite challenging and highly replayable. It's no wonder that so many games have been marketed based on the moku ludeme.

This post refers to some less known older games that are a plain rebranding of Gomoku.

Peg A Ro 

A 1920s game published in England. It comes with a 16x16 board and four sets of pieces (around 27 pegs per color) so that it can be played between two and four players.

Spoil Five

Published also in the 1920s by Chad Valley Co.

This game comes with a 14x11 board and with four colors. Each player only gets 16 pieces for each color, which is not enough to play the game (even if each player uses two colors). I wonder if even a 4 in-a-row would be easy to do in a match with four players.

Notice that the last suggested game in this ruleset in none other than the Game of NIM (in the misère version), one of the seminal games that started Combinatorial Game Theory.

Peg'ity

Another clone is Peg'ity from 1925, from Parker Brothers,

 

In the 1953 edition, there is the following supplement with three extra games/puzzles:

This last one is again misère NIM.

Quintro

Quintro is a 1935 version of Gomoku from Spear's Games.

Quinio

Quinio is a 1956 uncredited Gomoku game, published by Jumbo:

And a bonus, 1957's Chek-ro which is Pente before Pente: