Blokus: Which player are you?


 

 Blokus: a game of strategy, chance and challenge

            a game that will change your life

Goal of the game: To get all your pieces on the board first

Challenge of game: 

        1. Your pieces must only touch at their corners. Your pieces must touch. 

        2. You are not the only one playing.

I had no experience in different strategies when I started the game. It seemed to me that the safest thing to do to get all my blocks on the board was to build myself a little home on the board. I made a wall around what I thought was enough space and defended my territory. Whenever another player tried to enter into my space, I would block them by using a piece that would cover all their corners.

As the game went on, I ran in to a challenge. There were lots of holes in my allotted territory, but my pieces could not fit because they were only allowed to touch each others corners. This meant there was a lot of wasted space in my well defended borders that neither I nor my opponents could use. In the end, my carefully crafted strategy caused me to loose the game. I had the second to the most pieces left, and I could use none of them.

We played a second round of Blokus. This time a renown champion of the game was playing with us. While the champion and a want-to-be-champion violently fought each other, I quietly began a second strategy. I plunged forward into the heated battle trying to make my pieces spread out as far as possible on the board. Even though my own pieces where only allowed to touch corners, I could touch all sides of the apposing piece that I wanted. 

Through the game, I found that I could make my pieces fit like a puzzle around my component pieces. They did not leave as many holes and gaps as in the first game. Because the two challengers were too busy blocking each other, they forgot the two other players who were playing as well. By the time they gave up their fight, it was too late. I won.


 We are like the game of Blokus. Each of us has our own strategy of making life work for us. 

Sometimes our strategy is to protect ourselves. We make boarders and block anyone from entering. We build our life within those boarders. 

Sometimes we try to be the champion by making sure the other person cannot become one. We spend our whole efforts on blocking other people in hopes that by keeping them away, we can be or remain the champion. 

Sometimes we just go for it. We go into the center of the battle and spread ourselves so that we relate closely with those around us. We risk the potential of being blocked in order to fill the board of its holes.

I know that I have definitely tried out that first strategy in life. I like to avoid champions as all costs, because it can hurt to be blocked off by another person when they do it in order to make themselves greater. In a game of life, it is more difficult to tell who is a champion and who is not. To me, it felt safer to keep everyone out and to hinder anyone from coming in. For, if I would let one person come in, there may be the chance that they would disappoint me.

It worked for awhile. However, in the long run I found that by keeping my border secure, I had lots of holes with in my territory. I found it to be a rather lonely place. I was not able to fit as many pieces in there as I had originally thought.

What about the other strategy?

I don't have much experience with it. But from what people tell me, it works a lot better. They say that it fills in the holes that we were not meant to have. They say that it is hard but worth the risk.

They say:

We were not made to live alone.



Disclaimers:

1: If you decide to play Blokus and test out my strategies, there is a potential of both or neither of them will work for you. A game does not just depend on your own strategy it also depends on what the other people playing with you do. Strategy 2 is not a guarantee for winning Blokus.

2: I did not take pictures during the actual games, these pictures are of a game I that played against myself trying to re-enact that one game night.


 


I like to find stories in unlikely places and connect them with unlikely subjects. Here are stories and analogies that I see as I travel around the world.

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