New Rule

Introduction: It’s not the fish. This variation on the classic pen-and-paper game Dots has players seeking to wall up their opponents while keeping clear themselves, in a race against time as the board steadily fills up and closes in.

Players: 2 or 4

Materials:

• One sheet of standard letter-sized (A4) paper.
• At least one pen or pencil, any color.

Setting Up: The board is created by drawing a grid of evenly-spaced dots on the paper. The grid may be any size as long as it is square, but bear in mind that larger grids make for longer games. Designate a first player; if playing with four, divide the players into two teams and designate a play order. Beginning with the first player, each player chooses a space on the board (any area defined by four dots on each corner) and writes their initials in this space. This is their starting position.

How to Play: On their turn, players may either draw a wall on the board or write their initials on a new space. Similar to Dots, walls are drawn by connecting any two adjacent dots. No wall may be drawn that touches more than two dots — the start and end dots. All walls must be either horizontal or vertical.

Walls may be drawn anywhere in the manner described above (with one exception, see below), but new initials can only be written into spaces adjacent to those already initialed by the player — in this way the initialed spaces grow in a chain. Trapped spaces are considered dead (see below) and may not be used as an anchor for new initialing moves. Additionally, walls may not be drawn to bisect chains — the wall cannot divide two initialed spaces owned by the same player.

Anytime an initialed space is surrounded by walls on all four sides, it is trapped. This counts for solitary initialed spaces and for chains — if the entire chain is surrounded by walls, it is trapped and dead. However, if even one space remains adjacent to any part of the chain that is not blocked by a wall, the chain is alive and may continue to grow. Whenever a player’s space or spaces are trapped, the trapped player chooses a new space on the board and writes their initials there as the start of a new chain. This is a forced escape. Every time a player makes a forced escape, they lose a turn.

Winning the Game: Play continues until all spaces have been initialed. Once the board has been filled, the spaces and chains are tallied like so:

• Solitary trapped spaces are worth no points.
• Chains of two to five spaces are worth two points.
• Chains of six or more spaces are worth five points.

The player with the highest score is the winner.

Tags: Game Design //