LogFAQs > #933324619

68. Blokus (2000)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Abstract, tile-laying, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 4-6 plays over 4-6 sessions with 4 players (2017-2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player sits at the corner of a grid, with around twenty-five Tetris-like pieces of their own color. On your first turn, you place a piece on the board that touches your corner. On your subsequent turns, you place a piece onto the board such that it borders at least one of your pieces, corner-to-corner. You cannot have your pieces border one another's edges. The winner is the player who has the fewest pieces not on the board at the end of the game.

Design - Blokus isn't really a designer game. It's published by Mattel Games, which publishes Uno (not ranked). It's utterly abstract and doesn't do anything particularly new or innovative. I think I might have left it off my 2018 list even though it would have qualified, simply because I wasn't sure if it belonged.

And yet... it's really fun. It's a perfect-information abstract, but due to being a four-player, interactive game, it doesn't have 100% optimal plays like chess or checkers or tic-tac-toe (or Tak/Hive, for that matter). The endpoint of this game is technically player elimination (you'll eventually no longer be able to put any pieces on the board, and that point will be earlier for some than others), but the game has a very finite turn limit in the number of pieces everyone has to start the game.

Every game of Blokus I've played has had something of a similar arc: people rush from their corner toward the center with large, awkward pieces and attempt to establish control there. With the board divided into four like an X, everyone tends to find a natural enemy or enemies, as you decide which side to pursue, which territory you can "leave for later," which players you can block.

Because you can lay your pieces adjacent to others' (whereas you cannot for your own), blocking someone from entering your territory is difficult, and it gets contentious pretty quickly. It's a very interesting take on something like area control and one that relies a lot on spatial reasoning and tactics.

Experience - I don't always do even particularly well at Blokus, but almost every time I've made a move I felt was cool or been able to congratulate someone else for finding a really nice way to slip into others' territory. Blokus can make you a big loser, but games are also fast enough that you don't need to stew over it.

Future - Blokus doesn't feel like a "hobby game" for reasons I mentioned before, and as a result, I'd never do a game night centered around it. Combined with its strict player count, I have a hard time seeing it being added to my collection currently. But if there are exactly four and the call asks for a shortish game and players play fast and it's there, I'd always be up for it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness