Blokus Variants

· Inside Out

Difficulty:

Normally, each player in Blokus starts in a corner of the board. In the “Inside Out” variant, each player starts out touching one square in the exact center of the board. Each player’s starting piece must be entirely in their quadrant and touching one of the center 4 squares. After the starting location, play resumes normally.

Tips:

Don’t let the simple rules fool you. Since all players begin by touching each other, you can quickly shut out players in just a few moves if they’re not careful. Your starting piece and orientation becomes much more important. Alliances are made and broken in the blink of an eye as everyone backstabs everyone else. A favorite starting move is to orient your large “L” shape piece such that the corner of the “L” is touching the center square. If all 4 players play the “L” as the starting piece in their quadrant, each player has 2 choices regarding which direction they want to go.

· Start Anywhere

Difficulty:

Similar to “Inside Out,” each player may start out playing anywhere in their quadrant. After the initial starting location, play resumes normally.

Tips:

Starting near the center in your quadrant is not necessarily advantageous if everyone else is doing the same thing. You may try to start out far away from other players, near one of the sides, or somewhere in the middle of your quadrant.

· Ascending

Difficulty:

Everyone starts out in a corner. The first piece you must play is your “one” piece. The second piece you must play is your “two” piece. After that, you must get rid of all of your pieces with 3 squares, followed by pieces with 4 squares, and finally 5 squares.

Tips:

This can be difficult since you won’t have your smaller pieces near the end of the game to reach other areas. The good news is that your opponents have the same problem so you can use that knowledge to block them while leaving yourself space to play. This often ends up with high scoring games. It is rare to get rid of all of your pieces in this variant.

· All Out

Difficulty:

The goal of this game is different from all of the other variants. The goal is to work cooperatively to try and get all 4 players to legally play all of their pieces.

Tips:

After many games of competitive smack-talking and backstabbing, playing cooperatively to achieve a common goal can be a refreshing puzzle. Try not to waste much space in the beginning or create pockets where no one can reach. It is possible in the original Blokus game for all 4 players to go out, but it’s still challenging even with everyone working together. We have done it, though.

· Wraparound

Difficulty:

Wraparound is one of the most complicated variants of the original Blokus game, yet is extremely rewarding once you figure it out. Learning the rules is simple—following them can sometimes be hard.

Remember in the videogame Pac-Man how you could go through a tunnel and come out on the other side of the board? Imagine that, but with ALL 4 SIDES as the tunnels!

Here are the rules:

§ Everyone starts out touching one of the 4 corners.

§ Whenever you touch any one of the sides, you can tunnel through to the diametrically opposite side as if it were right next to you. (Pretend that the board is a sheet of grid paper that can wrap around and touch itself. Anything that you could legally play on that column or row if the board wrapped is legal.)

§ If you’re touching a corner, you can teleport to either or both of the diametrically opposite sides, with the same limitations regarding wrapping.

Example:

Considering the following example, only showing moves of the red player. Red starts out in a corner with piece 1 which is touching sides A and B. Red can choose to play off of that piece on her next move or teleport to side C or D. Red chooses to teleport to side C and play piece 2.

Note the orientation of piece 2. It starts one row above where piece 1 ends. If you imagine there’s an extra vertical column to the left of side A, that’s where she’s allowed to play when she teleports. If you print out this board and wrap it around so that side A touches side C, you would see that all of the moves drawn are legal. The same goes for side B wrapping around to touch side D.

On subsequent moves, Red plays pieces 3 and 4, then wraps back around to side A to play pieces 5 and 6. These are legal because they’re playing off of piece 4. Piece 7 follows 6, and then Red wraps from side D to side B to play piece 8. She teleports off of piece 8 to play pieces 9 and 10 on side D.

Clear as mud?

OK, one more example… This is illustrating what you cannot do. Red cannot play piece 11 off of piece 2 as shown below, because it is touching side C in the same row where piece 1 is touching side A.

In other words, if you printed this out and wrapped the paper so that sides A and C touch, you would notice that piece 11 would be conflicting with piece 1. In Blokus, pieces of the same color can only touch on the corners. You can’t have 2 flat sides of the same color touching each other. So, piece 11 is in an illegal position below.

Of course, these examples are only showing one color playing. In reality, all 4 players would be playing, teleporting, and blocking each other from teleporting.

Tips:

Mastering the techniques takes a lot of practice. Don’t let the difficulty deter you from trying this game. After we got the hang of it, Wraparound became one of our favorite variants. It really requires all 4 players to watch each move and make sure no one is cheating. There was only one Blokus variant we found that could top it for sheer intellectual prowess…

· Blokulus

Difficulty:

Warning: Learn Wraparound first before attempting this variant! Serious gamers only beyond this point…but ONLY if ye be men of valor or death awaits you all with big, nasty teeth!

Right, we warned you! Blokulus is a combination of Wraparound and Passing Pieces. Before the game begins, every player passes 2 pieces of their color to each of the other 3 players. After that, it’s just like Wraparound. You just happen to have some pieces of every color that you can use. You can choose to play with or without teams.

Why is this more fun and intellectually stimulating than regular Wraparound? Because you can use other players’ pieces against them! Yellow thought he was going to teleport from side B to side D, but someone else played a yellow (or blue or green) piece near or against the side to block him.

History:

Blokulus got its name because when you’re trying to explain it for the first time, it sounds like advanced calculus. But after you understand it, it’s has a mathematical beauty to it that’s unsurpassed. Fun trick to play on your friends: Play, say, 3 moves into Blokulus after you’ve passed pieces and teleported and then ask them to look at the board and try to guess the rules!