Blokus Trigon
I think I have mentioned before my affection for Blokus, a wonderful board game about placing pieces on a grid, but they are only allowed to touch at the corners.
Well, now Blokus Trigon is out, and the pieces are built out of triangles instead of squares.
Trigon pic
We just happened to see it while heading into Game Empire this week, and of course I snatched it up. We’ve only had one match so far, but I can tell you that it definitely requires an adjustment. Probably the biggest change is the fact that you play on a triangular grid, of course; this greatly reduces your ability to block opponents. It also makes it a bit harder to see possible combinations and shapes.
Because of the triangles that poke out of pieces, it is possible to place a piece with a corner touching a side of another piece, and still only have one point of contact. There is a variant rule that is more like classic Blokus, where you can only connect pieces when both pieces are touching at true corners; we found ourselves tending to play this way even if we didn’t have to, just out of habit.
There are some things that Trigon does better than Blokus: it handles three player much more effectively than the original, because the hex board lends itself to it. When playing three players, the outermost spaces are unavailable (and helpfully, the board marks them off with a matte finish).
Now I just need to track down a copy of Gemblo, a hex variant from Korea. I just learned about this one today — figures, I had wanted to try a hex version myself, and wrote up notes on it a couple of years ago and just never did anything with it. And now here it is, and it came out last year. You gotta move on ideas, see? 🙂
16 Responses to “Blokus Trigon”
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Blokus rocks. I definitely have to try Trigon! 🙂
Picture of the actual Trigon game…
Educational Insights Homepage the game’s manufacturer…
The Gemblo Homepage *Found while looking for maybe a cheaper place to buy this online, but seriously why not just order it from the site you linked.
Well in preview the img tags worked… I guess I just link to the pic I was trying to insert above
http://images.funagain.com/photo1/medium/15623.jpg
Mmmmm… packing problems… 😉
Are there other successful board games based off of the “21 NP-Complete problems” on Wiki?
Taolurker, I put the image you found in the main article.
Because
No copies on eBay, and though I found one other store with it, the store is not accepting orders for anything until August 1st.
But I DO have friends in Korea… hmm.
I love Blockus. Only territorial/positional domination game I have played where taking the center is usually a liability and direct attack is usually a guarantee of defeat. Aikido in board-game form. Would be interesting to see if the triangle/hex versions could maintain the same dynamics. Triangles especially would make a very different environment.
You realize you just made me kill an hour designing a board game based on set packing, right? Seriously. Now I need to playtest it.
I’ve always found that control of the center is critical to victory. Now I need to play against you.
In Trigon, you do not start at the edges — you start midway to the center, in a ring. So the center/edges dynamic feels quite different.
Wow Raph.. You didn’t have to do that on my account.
It may just be me, or my browser, but that image may be too large and it breaks the text of this page and makes the other image float around the main page. I hope my adding an image tag didn’t break something, I did photoshop up a smaller version if there’s any way to fix it?
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f27/taolurker/Trigon.gif
Also sent you an email, with maybe places to order the other game, so I don’t mess the code up on this page any more than I already did by adding long urls.
Ralf, now in turn you made me kill an hour 🙂
Here’s to hoping that hour didn’t die in vain. 🙂
You realize it’s your own fault; the throwaway reference to “NP-Complete” problems in one of the comics your Theory of Fun is what got me looking for the subject on Wiki in the first place. 😉
I’ve often thought that you could actually make inventory-tetris into a fun game. You’re a thief in a house full of loot; each piece of loot has an odd shape (tetris-like set of grid squares, probably) and has to be stuffed into a gunny sack (rounded-off grid of squares) to get it out of the house. Assign different cash values to each piece of loot, probably higher values to larger / more strangely shaped pieces, add a time attack, and you’ve got a game.
Variations can include having some items give you special abilities, various traps / alarms, guards / dogs, maybe a lockpicking side-game.
Or have I just described Thief? Still need to install / play that one…
Love Blokus. My four-year-old boy has me convinced of his genius status by his understanding of the game’s strategy. He lays his pieces down very aggressively and states, “I’m blocking you!” Not being a brain-development expert, I can only guess at the benefits of this game on the growing brain of a pre-schooler.
You can actually find PC versions of Blokus online. I tried an open-source Java clone called Blokish; unfortunately, I remember not being able to correctly rotate pieces. Blokus is definitely a puzzle game that needs an online version, ranking ladders, and championships. 🙂
Morgan: if you forgive lack of ladders and championships right of the bat 🙂 check out my quick hack above. Pieces can be rotated, however belatedly i realized for some shapes flips could be meaningful too. does the real version allow flips? in other words, is there specific side which connects to the board, or pieces can be placed with either side down?
Max: What do you mean try your quick hack "above"? By the way, after I wrote that about Blokish, I downloaded the bin again and found that the rotate function was different than the mirror function, and both functions were bound to different keys. Oops…
Yes, flips matter. In the boardgame, you can flip any way you like.
The official online version of Blokus can be found at http://www.blokus.com.
[…] So today I finally got to play GemBlo, another game a lot like Blokus and its little cousin Blokus Trigon, which I have written about before. GemBlo is a Korean game, and it’s been backordered on FunAgain for ages. I ended up locating a copy from Boulder Games, but it appears they are out of stock as well. But I am glad I picked it up! Plus, it supports up to six players. Click past the break for a pic of the board and my thoughts. […]