Gomoku

Gomoku (known as Five in a Row for Chinese retro players, Japanese: Gomoku Narabe) is a classic board game title on the Famicom. The most famous version is the official Nintendo Gomoku game. Based on traditional Japanese five-in-a-row rules, black and white players place stones in turns. The first player to connect five stones in a row horizontally, vertically or diagonally wins. It supports human vs AI and two-player local versus modes. Multiple AI difficulty tiers are available. Easy AI plays cautiously, while hard AI excels at defense, threats and double-three attacks, great for learning basic gomoku tactics. The UI is simple with a standard 15×15 board. You move the cursor to drop stones, and an undo function supports reviewing moves. Lacking flashy visuals, it focuses entirely on turn-based board strategy. Included on many Subor multicarts in China, it introduced countless players to Gomoku. It is one of the few pure puzzle & board games on the Famicom.

These are the default keys. Click the gamepad icon 🎮 in the player’s bottom toolbar to rebind them. Gamepads are detected automatically. On phones you get on-screen buttons.

1P

2P

The NES was always two-player — 2P uses the numeric keypad, and NumLock does not matter. No numpad? Rebind 2P to other keys in the 🎮 panel.