Baord Game Review: Blokus

If you've ever played Tetris, Blokus will look familiar: it has translucent plastic, tetris-shaped pieces in red, green, yellow, and blue. The goal is to play all your pieces onto the board, taking turns playing one at a time. The trick is that everyone else is trying to play all their pieces too, and they have incentive to block you.

There is only one rule: the only way to play a piece is so that is touching a corner of one of your already-played pieces.

What this means for strategy is players try to rope off areas of the board for themselves, but the corner-play rule means that one can "sneak in" to others' territory.

Even very young children can grasp the rules, though they tend to not play as aggressively as we adults.

COMPONENTS
Blokus comes in the large, flat square box. The rules sheet is one page, full color on both sides. The rules are so simple that there is room for several illustrations demonstrating play examples. Included is a silver plastic playing board with raised squares that the pieces satisfyingly snap into, and four sets of 21 pieces in red, blue, green and yellow. The pieces are lovely, translucent plastic in tetris-inspired shaped, and range from 1 to 5 "squares" in size, with the majority being 4 or 5 squares big.

SETUP
Setup can't be simpler. Each player chooses a color to play and gets those pieces to manage.

PLAY
Each player places one piece per turn, with the goal of playing all her pieces eventually. On the first turn, each player begins in a separate corner, and works outward from there. After the first turn, you can play anywhere on the board, with one caveat: the piece you play MUST touch the CORNER of one of your other pieces, and may never touch the SIDE of any of your own pieces. You may, of course, touch the sides of other players' pieces.

While having just one rule makes the game quite simple to learn, very young children sometimes have difficulty grasping the "only play on your corners" concept, but with practice, they get it. The colorful pieces and shapes and the way they snap into the board make Blokus attractive to children.

SCORING
There's no scoring or things to keep track of in Blokus. You simply want to play all of your pieces. If no one goes out, whoever has the fewest number of SQUARES in the form of pieces left, wins. If you have one 3-square piece left and your opponent has one 4-sqare piece left, you have won.

STRATEGY
Block 'em off! Keep 'em out! You'll quickly find that outlining a section of the board with your tiles is a big step towards "reserving" some area to fill up later. This tactic is known as an "area enclosure" mechanic in game-speak. Of course, your opponents will figure this out too, so the beginning of the game is a race diagonally towards the center of the board.

Since the number of squares in your pieces that you have left at the end determines who wins, play larger pieces first.

Get the 5-squares played and out of the way. It's a lot easier to find a spot to sneak in a 1- or 2-square near the end of the game than a 5-square.

Watch your opponents. If you can block off a major offensive corner of theirs, you've punched a huge hole in their own strategy and will have them scrambling to find other avenues for playing their pieces.

Blokus is a spatial game, and finding the perfect spot, or the ONLY spot, to play a piece, is a happy "Aha!" moment. There is little more satisfying than being in a tight spot, then noticing a play that will open the entire board back up to you.

SUMMARY
Blokus is an easy game to love. Tactile, colorful, strategic, plays well with children, won't blow away so you can play it outside, and being all plastic means that heck, you can submerge the board and pieces and no harm is done.

Having only one rule makes teaching and learning Blokus easy. The final product, with the tetris-shaped pieces filling the board in all four colors, looks like a Mondrian painting. Blokus has also earned loads of awards: the 2002 Spiel des Jahres, 2003 Dr. Toy 100 Best Children's Products, and Mensa Select National Competition Winner, among others.

Blokus is best with four players, though the board can be marked smaller for two or three players. There's also a smaller version, designed specifically for two players, called Travel Blokus. Time: 20 minutes. For 2-4 players.

Overall Rating: 5/5. PLAY IT WITH KIDS. Trust me. Their little brains will adore it.
Age: 5 to Adult
Players: 2 to 4. Works best with 4. A bit clumsy with 3, but works fine for 2 if you close off the board as suggested in the rules.
Time: 20 minutes
Designer: Bernard Tavitian
Publisher: Educational Insights
Price: around $22 at online retailers like Fairplay Games, Funagain Games, or Thoughthammer, $29.95 MSRP. Available at many Toys 'R' Us, Target, or Barnes & Noble locations.

There is a 2-player Travel Edition available, as well as Blokus Trigon, a version with hex pieces.