2 Player Blokus Trigon

Blokus Trigon

I finally got around to playing Blokus Trigon. I played a two player game with my daughter Tal.

First impressions of looking at Blokus Trigon were very positive. It looked like a game identical to the original except that it would also play well with three. Pure improvement.

Opening it up, I noticed that the number of larger to smaller pieces was slightly changed, of course, but kept in pretty much the same ratio. Nothing radical here.

When I began to play, I discovered that blocking your opponent from spreading is fiendishly difficult. In the original, only two players can cross an intersection; now three can, and in multiple ways. In addition, in the original a flat side of one of your pieces can't spawn another piece; in Trigon, even featureless sides can spawn new pieces, since a triangle can be placed against it at a single point.

Which means that obstructing play becomes Sisyphean. You can take over spaces the other player needs, with difficulty, since the pieces fit in smaller spaces. But you can't really block someone from expanding.

We ended our game, playing with two colors each according to the rules, with nearly no pieces remaining. I had a single piece left in one color, while Tal had three pieces left in one color.

I'm not entirely thrilled about this result. I definitely want to play a three-player game (played on a smaller board) to see how that works. And maybe a four player game would also be somewhat more difficult, since in two players you can purposely keep a balance open for both of your colors.

New Games

I'm only now sorting through the new games I acquired in Canada and the U.S. They all look good, and I don't know which one to start with.

Unfortunately, I just opened one of the small card games I got in the math trade and promptly dumped all the cards on the floor. When I picked them back up and counted them, I found I was missing 10 cards from the game. I'm assuming that I have just misplaced the cards under the couch, somehow, but I'm writing the previous owner just to verify.

Game News

And we have a winner: Fortune tells us that Toys 'R Us is "making a comeback" with the previously-mentioned pink Hasbro games. It's not exactly the phrase I was looking for ("board games are making a comeback") but it's close enough. Suzzanne Kapner, you get the "I didn't know that board games have been said to be 'making a comeback' in dozens of newspaper articles every year for the last fifteen years" award.

BGN tells us that Israel has a new brick and mortar game store. One of the owners is the only current importer of these games (Silver Stars), about which he has many exclusive importing agreements. I'm not entirely sure that this is fair to the other retailers (of which there are two, one brick and mortar and one online). I'm awaiting comment from Silver Stars for details.

The Cleburne Times Review yearns for more tabletop gaming.

The Daily Republic notes that grownups aren't too good at video games, and that may be one reason why parents dismiss video games as valueless.

Kids in Alabama are making board games. (thanks, Clay)

You can win a whole boatload of Hasbro games here.

The beautiful TV series Planet Earth is now also a DVD game. As Smartplanet ironically notes, "Just a shame it uses electricity to play it..."

There are dozens of hotels and resorts that include information about the board games that they provide for their guests. Last we heard board games will also be an integral part of a new UK train service, and now it appears that the Canadian Snow Train service is also getting in the game.

Finally, another card game shooting, this time in OH.

Yehuda