Blokus

A few months ago, George introduced me to a board game called Blokus. When he first pulled it out, I noted that it was made of very colorful plastic pieces in a variety of simple shapes, like a children's' toy. However once we started to play, I was amazed at how elegantly designed the game is.Many board games, like Settlers or Puerto Rico, have a variety of complex pieces accompanied by complex rules and generate a gameplay with commensurate depth and complexity. There are even more involved games, like Diplomacy, that have even more complex rules and have correspondingly greater depth.

One might then think that there is some kind of proportional relationship between rule complexity and game depth. (I'm deliberately omitting from the analysis, non-strategic games that are primarily social like Pictionary, Taboo, or Scruples.)What makes Blokus interesting and unique to me, is the way that it has very simple rules yet complex and strategy gameplay. I could almost call this emergent behavior where, like fractals, a minimal ruleset creates a complex outcome.A few weeks ago, I bought my own Blokus set and brought it over to Rourke and Jen's place. When I first pulled it out, they noted "Ages 6 and up" and jokingly commented: "What, do you think we're only capable of playing a game for little kids?" It took about 1 minute to explain the rules, and then they totally fell in love with the game. We continued to play several rounds before and after dinner that day.

This got me thinking about why Blokus is able to achieve such interesting gameplay with such simple design. There are very few games out there with this kind of behavior, only Go comes immediately to mind. The simplicity and elegance of the design makes me think that while creating a stream of complex resource-management games or military-type strategy games is by no means easy, creating simple games with creativity and depth is truly hard. The problem of designing a game like Blokus is only minimally an engineering process. Rather, creating such a game seems much less of a development process and much more dependent on some initial spark of creativity. While I can imagine a process by which one could form a team and create playable games like Settlers using a structured development process, I cannot imagine how one could possibly have come up with Blokus.