Blokus is a very easy to learn abstract strategy game playable by young chil- dren as well as adults. It is that rarity, an abstract game that has some skill in it, yet isn’t too complex for smaller children and casual game players.
In Blokus four players take turns placing, on a 400-square textured grid, plas- tic polyominoes made up of from one to five squares. The shapes often remind people of the video game Tetris, but all Tetris pieces consist of four squares. Each of a player’s pieces must touch corner-to-corner, and only corner-to-corner, with at least one of his or her pieces on the board. No “stacking” is allowed. When no one can play any more pieces, the player with the fewest squares in total amongst his unplayed pieces wins.
There are 21 pieces of each color. As you might guess, as the game goes on it becomes harder to play the pieces of five squares, as opposed to the smaller ones. A 15-point bonus is awarded if a player can play all his pieces, with an additional five points to end with the single one-square piece. If you’re only playing once, such bonuses don’t matter, but for a series of games the combined scores can determine an overall winner.
The strategy comes in trying to maximize your own placement possibilities while blocking the opponent. Because pieces can only touch at the corners, it is not easy to block another player, and in a typical game chains of pieces intersect and intertwine in a wide variety of interesting patterns. Early play consists of trying to chain your pieces over much of the board, while confining opponents’ pieces to corners.
The game quickly becomes interactive as each player’s move can strongly affect the next player. There is probably a slight advantage to playing first, but not noticeably so.
The raised plastic square board has indentations, via gridlines, to help keep the plastic pieces stationary once played, though less physically capable youngsters may have some trouble with placement. The pieces are transparent colored plastic, robust enough unless they’re stepped on.
Because the game is played on a square board, it doesn’t work well for three players, its biggest drawback. Blokus Trigon is an alternative published version that works best with three, using a hexagonal board of triangles and polyominoes consisting of triangles rather than squares.
Blokus is probably more interesting for adults than many games that are accessible to younger children. As an abstract strategy game, Blokus is not for adrenaline junkies or those who like physically active games. It is far more like checkers than like Hungry Hungry Hippos. Yet it is very easy to learn, easy to play — though not easy to play well — and at 20 to 30 minutes, it has a short enough game time to “fill in” between longer games. Kids as young as three can play, though they usually need to be older to grasp the strategy, and younger ones may need help identifying legal placements toward the end of the game. Children also like the attractive pieces, varying patterns, and orderly placement inherent in the game, even if they aren’t playing it well enough to win.
How do you succeed? Each player begins by placing a piece in one corner. Some people like to try to make a chain all the way across the board early on. Many quickly play the different five-square pieces, especially the ones that cover three diagonal spaces, while there’s still plenty of room. Remember, it’s not the number of pieces you have left at the end, it’s the number of squares amongst those leftovers that determines your penalty. So if you have one five-square piece, one three-square, and one two-square, you score minus 10.
Some shapes are harder to fit than others, as you’ll learn from experience, so you tend to place those earlier in the game. Hence each turn is a combination of which piece to play and where to play it. Often a key move is one that lets you escape through an opponent’s blockade into a new area of expansion.
The hub of the Blokus universe is the community at blokus.com. There you’ll find an online demo as well as free play, or you can “watch” others compete. You can also find online tutorials, though these will be more about the strategy than about the rules. Hence it’s easy to try the game before you buy, and with a fairly low list price, there isn’t a lot of risk in adding Blokus, or its similarly priced com- panion Blokus Trigon, to your collection.
Players often wonder how the name is pronounced. Blocus (with a “c”) in French means “blockade.” U.S. players usually pronounce the name “block-us,” since a major part of the game is blocking; phonetically in English it would be “blow-kus.”
This popular game has won many awards and engendered several spinoffs. In addition to Blokus Trigon, there’s Blokus Duo/Travel Blokus, which is for two and played on a smaller board. Blokus Gigantic offers a board 101 inches long and 101 inches wide! There are also video game versions. Blokus 3-D is actually a re-labeled version of the game Rumis. Look hard enough and you’ll also find what appear to be knock-offs, such as Tetris – The Strategy Family Chess Game or simply The Strategy Game. Copyright law only protects the wording of rules, not the ideas in games, so this sort of thing happens more than you’d think.
In the U.S., Educational Insights was the first publisher of Blokus, but French originator Sekkoia was bought by Mattel in January 2009. With ownership by one of the world’s major toy makers, the game is likely to gain the visibility of such traditional titles as Monopoly and Risk. This should make experienced opponents more readily available for players who are interested in a skilled competition. What parents and their children will remember best, though, is that Blokus is an excellent, quick, easy-to-learn game for families.
Bernard Tavitian has a masters degree in mathematics and doctorate in bio- physics, but no game design credits other than Blokus and its non-3-D variants. The well-known four-color map theorem is mentioned with the designer’s biogra- phy, which may help provide insight into the design process. Another source sug- gests Tavitian was “inspired to create the game while trying to find an appropriate frame for a painting of an orchestra made up of geometric figures.” In any case, Blokus feels like one of those rare “why didn’t I think of that” games of brilliant simplicity. Professional designers may spend years trying to devise such games, but are unlikely to think one up; instead, “it just happens,” and often it happens for someone who doesn’t otherwise design games.
The major design lesson from Blokus may be: Don’t discount very simple ideas; occasionally one can be turned into a widely popular game.
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