LogFAQs > #967628666

20. Blokus

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2453/blokus

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, abstract
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-25 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 5-10 plays with 4 players

Blokus is a puzzle game where you compete to lay the most Tetris-esque tiles down from your hand onto a shared map. Each player starts with the same set of tiles onto a square grid, with the restrictions that your first tile starts on your own corner of the map, that each subsequent tile must touch an existing tile of yours, and that your pieces must only touch one another at their corners, not on edges. Eventually the space on the map runs out; at that point, the player whose remaining tiles have the least stuff on them wins.

Unlike many of the previous games on this list (but not unlike a few games above it!), Blokus isn't a "designer game" - it was published by Mattel, which is more "mass-market." It also lacks a lot of the parts that make designer games feel "designer-y" - lots of rules, a solo element, any sort of sense of progression. It feels more like a puzzle, or Chess, and while there are a ton of tactics, I'm not sure there's a ton of depth (admittedly not necessarily a modern game trait).

That said - I've never had a bad game of Blokus. Every time, it's a fun little spatial puzzle. Every time, it's tactical, with something of a race to the center before, and you need to figure out how to get "through" your opponents' pieces.

And that's where the puzzle/knife fight really begins. That's actually one of the greatest dynamics of Blokus - while your pieces need to touch your own pieces on the pieces' corners only, you're allowed full adjacency to your opponents' pieces. And since your opponents' pieces also only touch each other's corners, that means that if you can get your pieces' corner to fit into one of your opponent's corners, your subsequent piece can actually go over their two pieces and break into the other side. But you can also effectively block your opponents' pieces - while laying adjacent to your opponent's piece just provides a cozy neighbor, placing a piece so that it's in an opponent's corner square - well that's war.

I don't have a ton else to say about Blokus - I think a lot of it just comes down to beauty in simplicity. It looks great on the table, it feels great to snap a nice plastic piece into the hard grid, and its straightforwardness makes it incredibly quick to play. It's clearly more filler than main event for me, but it fills that role pretty perfectly at the right player count. Now that player count is very restrictive, but if people show up while others are playing Blokus, they can easily spectate for ten minutes to watch the resolution of this clever design.