Blokus

For people who have never heard of Blokus before or played the game, here’s how it works. There is a game board and lots of little odd shaped pieces included in four different colors. In the original game, the pieces look quite a bit like Tetris pieces. In the new Blokus Trigon game, the pieces are very angular and strange looking. The original game board in a rectangle, the new game board is a hexagon. Each player is assigned a color, and players take turns placing a game piece on the board so that each new piece only touches the tippy corner of another piece. The object is to place all your pieces on the board first. Sounds simple, but it’s not. You can be blocked by another player’s pieces, and your pieces can block another player’s moves. Many times, there are still pieces to be placed when there are no more moves possible on the board. In this case, the player who has placed the most pieces on the board wins.

With both games, there are several different ways to play. You can give each player a color and have four players in the game. You can play the ‘drafting’ variation and give each player two colors. In this version, only two players can play. Or, one person can play a solitaire version, trying to get as many pieces as possible on the board before running out of moves. Each game of it only takes about thirty minutes on average, so it’s easy to fit a game into a busy day. But be warned, Blokus has been called highly addictive and you may find yourself wanting to play more and more and maybe even thinking about possible piece placements in your head hours before your next game, or hours after your last game. People who love the game Tetris will really love these two games.

This game has won awards for its capacity to make players think in new and abstract ways. The game has actually been praised by the super smart people at Mensa for being a game that can really make people smarter. Both versions of the game are great to get players thinking, and it can be played by five year olds or by adults. Blokus and Trigon are games that the whole family can play together. The games are a great opportunity for parents to teach kids to find different ways to look at any situation.