This week at our Board Games Club for Adults we played a 4 in a row game you might have heard of (Connect 4) and a 5 in a row game you might not of: Pentago. On their turn each player does two things: add one marble of their colour to the board, then twist one quadrant of the board through 90º. The game board is constantly changing, and the key is to set up the board so that you twist it to make a 5 in a row on your next move, hoping the other player cannot see what you are about to do.

We also played Tri It! (Spears, 1995). A role of the die tells the player which colour line (yellow, green or blue) to move along. The aim is to get your three counters around a triangle and score the number of points shown inside the triangle. The first to 10 points wins.

Our other  game was The Knot Game (The Works). Players are dealt a set of tiles which they take turns to lay down. They must link to a rope already laid down by matching the colour. The winner is the first to lay all their tiles.

Our theme this week was making squares. Appropriate then that our first game was Squares (Waddingtons, 1982). This is a three dimensional version of the game sometimes called Dots and Boxes which is played on paper. The grid is 4 x 5, giving a total of 20 squares. Initial set-up has all the blocks turned to red on one side, and white on the other side. The player who is looking at red has to make a white square, and vice versa. Players take it in turns to swivel one block. Whoever swivels the last block to make a square claims it with a peg of their colour. The winner is the first to make 11 squares ((20 ÷ 2) + 1): sorry could not resist a bit of maths. As there are 20 squares in the grid this game could end in a draw. The strategy is to avoid turning two blocks into three blocks, or the next player will turn three blocks into four blocks and make a square. As with so many of these abstract strategy games it is about being able to anticipate how your next move will change the game board, and stop yourself from making that move if it is not to your advantage!

Our second game this week was Territorie (Invicta, 1979). (Aside: Invicta made Mastermind, Anna’s favourite game and one the children really enjoyed last year). (Second aside: am I alone in being bothered by the spelling of this game with an ‘ie’ at the end and not a ‘y’?). Back to the game: in Dots and Boxes and Squares, a fence/block is  permanent once played. In Territorie a player has two options: either add a new fence to the 8 x 8 grid, or swing an existing fence in any direction. When a player encloses a square with a fence on all four sides they claim it with their own colour peg.

Part way through this game there was a contagious outbreak of giggling, cause unknown. Around the same time one child noticed that the grid had started to resemble towns and villages and they started naming places on the Isle of Wight. This, combined with the giggling, unleashed an outburst of creativity and cooperation. The children decided to work together to link up the towns and villages. They got as far north as Edinburgh before our time was up. If we had longer I am sure they would have got to the north pole, and possibly off into space, such was their enthusiasm.

Last week at our adult’s board games club we Othello, so we brought it back this week so that those who missed it could have a go.

We played Chinese Chequers two weeks ago, so we built on that by playing Halma this week. These games share a strategy of building ladders to speed progress across the board; it is also a good idea to move your pieces as a unit, rather than sending a few ahead and leaving the rest in your home “camp” – leaving gaps makes it harder to build those ladders that are vital to winning.

Our other game this week was Circular 4 in a Row. You cannot buy this game so I made one with a piece of MDF from an online craft shop and some felt tip pens. The circle has four rings which are each a different colour. Each ring is divided into eight equal segments. This produces 32 segments in total. Each player has 16 counters of their own colour (in this case black and white). Players take it in turns to place a counter, trying to be the first to make 4 in a row. There are different ways of winning: a straight line going through four differently coloured rings; a half-circle staying on one colour; or a spiral, where the line goes through each colour but is not straight. The key is not to let the other player make a 3 in a row which is open at both ends: you can block one end on your next go, but not both! This is the same strategy used in 4 in a Row/Connect 4, but the circular nature of this game adds an extra level of challenge.

We spanned the ages from 5 to 85 at our Family Event. We welcomed four people who had not previously been to our club, which definitely made it feel like a success.

We played some abstract strategy games from around the world: Picaria, Five Field Kono and Nine Men’s Morris. We also played some modern games: Stay Alive, the marble dropping game we have played at the after school club; Joggle, a game played on a 8 x 8 board where the winner is the first to make a 2 x 3 rectangle of their coloured marbles (black or white), and the board is indented with four colours (red, blue, green and yellow) with a dice throw determining which colour your marble is placed on, and if the die lands on a ‘joggle’ you get to choose any colour for your marble; and Dig In!, a colour and pattern recognition game requiring quick eyes and quick hands: a bowl is filled with 128 coloured pieces (32 objects in four colours – red, blue, green and yellow) and each player has 15 seconds to find the 6 items on their card, followed by a final round where all players dig in at the same time but can only use one hand. There are two options: the easier one where the 6 items on the card are in grey, and the harder one where the 6 items are in specific colours and must be correctly matched.

We also had our first game of Othello. This game was invented as Reversi in 1883 by either Lewis Waterman or John W. Mollet, with each claiming the other a fraud. Although as Wikipedia puts it, it might have been invented “perhaps earlier by someone else entirely”. The game is played on a 8 x 8 board, and the 64 pieces are black on one side and white on the other. You capture a piece by trapping it between your own colour pieces, one at each end of a line which can be in any direction. A trapped piece is then flipped to become your own colour. Pieces will be flipped many times during the game. The winner is the player with the most pieces of their colour when no more pieces can be played.  In 1971 a Japanese salesman, Goro Hasegawa, changed the way the game starts and renamed it Othello, after Shakespeare’s play. In Reversi the players choose where in the centre of the board to put their first two pieces each; in Othello four pieces are placed in a standard diagonal pattern and then the game begins. This is a game we will definitely be bringing back so that we can explore some of the strategies used to win.

If anyone is blaming the heavy downpour of rain at 10:00 am as their reason for not coming along, we plan to run a similar event during the February 2019 half term.

This week we played Halma, a game invented in 1883-1884 by an American surgeon called George Howard Monks. The name comes from the Greek work meaning to jump.

We played a four-player game, with each player having 13 pieces. The winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their home “camp” to the opposite “camp”. Movement is either by step or by jump. A step is from one square to an adjacent square in any direction. A jump can be over your own piece or your opponent’s piece, to an empty square beyond; multiple jumps are allowed; steps and jumps cannot be combined. We explained the strategy of building ladders so the children could move their pieces quickly across the board. We also showed them the trick of zigzagging along a straight line of pieces.

The game had not finished by the time our hour was up! This was not something I was expecting, as I had packed Chinese Chequers and Five Field Kono, other replacement games, in my bag. We had to call a halt to the game, giving our judgment on who had done well. One child had got six of their 13 pieces to the opposite camp, but still had a few pieces left in their own camp. Another child had fewer pieces in their opposite camp, but overall had got more of their pieces across the board, as well as setting up some good ladders and using the zigzagging trick. As we were packing up the children said they wanted to play this game again next time. This is something I have observed: if you ask them what their favourite game is they will often say it is the game they have just played. I’m not sure this is really true, but it does show the capacity of children to live in the present moment, something we could all benefit from trying.