Blokus

Here is a game we got a few weeks back at the thrift shop in Ramona.  Blokus gives you a big grid and each player gets a bag of tetris-shaped pieces.  You take turns putting pieces on the board, starting in the corner squares and only connecting to your existing pieces at the corners.  At first it felt like a simple game where you get as much territory as you can and block the other player in.  But a solid line of your pieces won't stop to other player if there's a corner they can expand on.  So it gets really interesting.

With two players, I can't see any way we would not both get all our pieces down.  But there are a few rule variants on the little instruction sheet.  One said for one player to play blue and red and the other to play green and yellow, and we played them in alphabetical order.  That gave a much better feel for the game, and one by one the players got stuck.  When the last player is unable to move, everyone gets minus one point for each square of each unplaced piece and the final player gets +20 plus five more if their final piece was the one-square piece.

Here is a neat example where I thought I had cutoff the red player, but Anne squeezed through a one-block gap between my green and yellow pieces.  She went on to get a few more pieces behind my line.

The rules gave two possible solitaire versions, and both seemed like good challenges.

This was surprisingly easy to learn and it felt like you could go a bit mad staring at all the corners and looking for a strategy.  We like games like that.  We wouldn't devote our lives to learning every secret and every conceivable tactic, but this one is a keeper for future weekend play.