About this game
The friendliest-looking game we make
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A grid of dots, and turns spent joining two of them. Close the fourth side of a square and you own it, and you go again. For the first two-thirds of a game this feels like a colouring exercise, everybody drawing lines nobody can use, and then in about four moves the whole thing detonates and one player takes eleven boxes in a row.
That reversal is the game. Dots and Boxes looks like something you play with a five-year-old on the back of a menu — and it is — but it also has a real endgame theory, and the moment you learn it you will start winning games you used to lose by twenty.
Where it comes from
It was published in 1889 by Édouard Lucas, the French mathematician, under the name la pipopipette. Lucas had a habit of this: he also invented the Tower of Hanoi and dressed it up with a story about monks, so the man clearly understood packaging.
It has been taken seriously ever since. Elwyn Berlekamp, one of the founders of combinatorial game theory, wrote an entire book on it, on the grounds that a game simple enough for a napkin and deep enough to resist analysis is exactly what the field is for. Most people who play it never meet any of that, which is part of the charm — the theory is optional and the game is not.
What this version does with it
Three board sizes, and they are three different games rather than the same game at three scales. The 3 × 3 is short enough to see the whole chain structure in your head. The 5 × 5 is the standard, and the one where most of the tactics live. The 7 × 7 is long, and it rewards planning that starts far earlier than feels natural.
The computer has three levels. Casual takes free boxes and not much else. Sharp understands that giving away the smallest chain is better than giving away the biggest. Ruthless counts chains and will hand you two boxes in order to take nine, which is the move that makes people put their phone down and think. Every size keeps its own best-box record, and there is a pass-and-play mode for two people on one screen — which is, honestly, how this game is best played.
Thirty seconds to start
- Tap the gap between any two dots to draw that line. Anywhere near it counts.
- Complete a box and it is yours, and you move again — chains can run a long way.
- Most boxes at the end wins. N starts a fresh game.
The idea worth knowing before your next game
You are not trying to take boxes for as long as possible. You are trying to be the player who still has a harmless move left when the other one runs out — because whoever moves first into the long chains hands them over. Once you see the board as a set of chains waiting to be opened rather than a set of boxes waiting to be closed, everything about the last ten moves changes. The double-cross, which is how you keep control after taking a chain, is explained properly in the guide.