[wsgcmaom] Pentominoes

Pentominoes, the game of two players placing pentominoes in an 8x8 board, is an elegant game.

It is difficult to create a virtual version of the game because we lack good, intuitive input devices for specifying rotation and flips.  Perhaps a smartphone accelerometer, though one would need a separate device to see the board and pieces.

Learning to play the endgame might be fun.

Consider using machine learning to learn a heuristic for position evaluation.  The input seems very suited for machine learning, and the ground truth of position values can be computed by brute force.

Are there a piece sets other than the pentominoes which are better to play with?  Or board shapes?  Perhaps aesthetics.  Or yielding many levels of human play.

Both pieces and board colored checkerboard (or gradient), each 2 different colors.  Traditionally, parity is ignored in piece play.

Mark a few randomly chosen squares inaccessible at the beginning of the game to prevent death by opening theory, in the style of Chess960.