Blokus

Blokus is an abstract strategy board game for two to four players, invented by Bernard Tavitian and published in 2000 by the Sekkoia company. It has won several awards, including the Mensa select award and the 2004 Teacher's Choice Award. Tavitian, an engineer and artist was inspired to create the game while trying to find an appropriate frame for a painting of an orchestra made up of geometric figures.

The correct pronunciation of the name Blokus has been the subject of some debate. The game's inventor is French, and implies that a French pronunciation may differ, but he referred the question to game's US distributor, who responded: "We pronounce it with a "soft o" as in "block." But many customers seem to pronounce it with a "long o" as in "Blow-kus."

Game play
The goal is to get rid of all of the 21 pieces you initially start off with. The pieces are all of the free polyominoes using one to five squares (rotations and reflections don't count). On each player's turn, they can put one of their remaining pieces on the 20 square by 20 square board. Each piece must connect to another piece of the same color by at least one touching corner, but no two pieces of the same color can share an edge (so they cannot tessellate into each other).

The novice typically tries to seal off an area for themselves to reduce the area the opponents can access. But since pieces only are connected via their corners, another player can easily pass through. It is therefore difficult to cut off other people from accessing 'your' area. Instead, the successful tactic is to try to expand into as many areas on the board as possible. In other words, game strategy is dominated by offence rather than defense. Blocking is possible to an extent by cutting off an opponents access to the corners of their pieces using yours in strategic ways.

The smaller tiles are very useful during the later stages of the game: the smaller a piece is, the better it is at occupying the holes in the tiles of other colors, and thus opening up new areas of the board for expansion. It often happens that no player can finish off all their tiles. The score is calculated by deducting a point for each square left on a player's remaining pieces (leaving you with a negative score). Should you ever manage to play all your pieces, you get a bonus score of +15. Achieving this, and having played your single-square piece last gets you another five points for a final score of +20.cumulatively.

In a four player game, each player takes a different color, and play rotates around in a clockwise direction. With two players, each player takes two colors, starting in opposite corners. This allows further strategy, as a player can sacrifice one of their colors in order to strengthen the position of their other color in order to try and play all the pieces of that color and win the bonus score.

In the three-player game, the players take turns playing for the fourth color (blue). Because the players must play out of corners of the board, one player will always be playing out of the corner opposite to blue. It is widely believed that this is an advantage. The reason for this is that blue is generally used as a tool to block the other player’s moves. For most of the early game, the player opposite blue is too far away to be successfully blocked, but can still use the color itself to block others. Various methods have been suggested to solve this problem, but it is recommended that players come to an agreement among themselves that best suits their preferences.
 

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