Buncha Blokus

After a quick game of Ingenious (described below) Jake started hunting for some more players, because he was itching to get in a game of Blokus. I (Chris) usually don't like to play games where there is no random element. Chess or checkers, where everyone starts with the exact same pieces and has a predictable amount of moves tend to bore me. Give me a tile picking game like Scrabble any day.

Even though Blokus has everyone starting with the same 21 pieces, it seems to have more of the feel of a Scrabble than Chess. So I like it.

Jake managed to round up Thomas, but everyone else was worried about their final projects and exams (bunch of whiny slackers, if you ask me). We VERY quickly brought Thomas up to speed, and jumped into the game.

Blokus is really built to be a 4-player game. In order to make it more for 3 players, we took the red set of pieces, and used to block off the outer three rows on two sides of the board. Otherwise, it would simply be too easy to get all the pieces on the board. This was sort of an experiment -- we played the game, and got some results.

Blokus, Game 1
Jake	-14
Chris	-18
Thomas	-25

We decided that we had constricted the board a mite too much, and used the red set to simply block off TWO outside rows on two sides of the board. This seemed to be just about right.

We played three more games -- here are the results (remember, you receive a negative point for each leftover square in the blocks you have remaining -- you get a positive score if you use all your tiles, but none of us managed to do that today).

Blokus, Game 2
Thomas	-5
Chris	-15
Jake	-19

Blokus, Game 3
Chris	-11
Jake	-19
Thomas	-24

Blokus, Game 4
Chris	-8
Thomas	-13
Jake	-13

Analysis: Jake did a lot better with constricted table, soundly winning Game #1. Thomas won with the widest margin, and with the lowest score in game #2. We all won at least one game, and Chris finished strong with 2 wins at the end -- but that last game was close, with both Jake and Thomas being only 5 points (probably only one playable piece!) behind, the closest spread of all the games.

We all spent a lot of time trying to really box each other in. That is a big part of the cleverness of this game -- trying to keep yourself in the clear while trying to trap your opponents. By the last game we were all trying to increase the 'you suck' factor of this game as much as we could. And we were fairly successful. The satisfaction of really good block is only outweighed by a really slick escape -- this game has boatloads of both.

Blokus is a top-notch game -- beautiful, tactile, simple and strategic. It's tough to find an abstract strategy game that has it all (especially for me -- I'm a sucker for a theme!) -- Blokus manages to effortlessly win you over.