We study the plactic algebra and its action on bosonic particle configurations in the classical case. These particle configurations together with the action of the plactic generators can be identified with crystals of the quantum analogue of the symmetric tensor representations in type A. It turns out that this action factors over a quotient algebra that we call partic algebra, whose induced action on bosonic particle configurations is faithful. We describe a basis of the partic algebra explicitly in terms of a normal form for monomials, and we compute the center of the partic algebra.