I've written a program that can play mini optimally by brute forcing the whole game tree. If anyone is interested I could set up a bot account that would play games if invited. And any human-parseable insights that I get out of it I would share. All I know so far is 2+O is a draw.

I should clarify that I have not and would not use it myself during games. I would only use it in games that a separate bot account is playing.

Personally I am welcomed such researches/bots.

Same research is interesting about Polyomino Penta. How you can estemate computational complexity of Penta variant?

From random sampling of the game tree, I estimate the total number of mini games, after picking an opening pair, at 10^{12 and the number of penta games between 10}47 and 10^55. Penta would need something more clever than myself armed with a computer crunching through the tree all the way to the end.

That's meant to be “10¹² and the number of penta games between 10⁴⁷ and 10⁵⁵”

I've set up this account now, pokes_c, challenge it to a game!

From the one game I've played, I've learned this position after 2. Z4 is already lost for blue.