Rubik Distance The name probably originates with the player Rubik87; perhaps he was the first to identify and explain the concept. The idea is to express the ‘reach’ of a given piece – how much distance it can cover, combining both horizontal and vertical dimensions. A quasi-mathematical definition is: The sum of the dimensions of… Read More »
I recently did some work exploring some common beginner mistakes for the website pentolla.com, where I go through a game and single out specific (bad) moves that are common for beginners, explaining what the mistakes are, why they are mistakes, and examples of better moves. You can take a look at it in one of… Read More »
Okay, so you know that you need to move toward the middle of the board at the start of the game, and you know that you should be doing it with your biggest pieces. But which pieces? And which orientation should they be in? As for which pieces, some are just better than others. One… Read More »
In Fight or Flight – The Problem, I discussed the easy part: situations where you might fall into the trap of playing a bad move (specifically a compound error), and what kinds of moves might be bad in these cases. The hard part is recognizing these specific moves, and finding better alternatives. The key to… Read More »
This post is about what to do after you realize your opponent has gained an advantage. One of the hardest but most important skills in blokus is learning how to play from a bad position. Since the nature of blokus at the moment is that the score does matter, not just the win or the… Read More »
While writing first post I originally included a blurb at the end about how the idea of moving toward the center could be applied to later game decision making as well. Eventually I decided it didn’t really fit there – that post was too long anyway – so I decided to move it to this… Read More »
Near the start of my last post, I mentioned that if you have ever read the rules from the physical board game of blokus (or looked for strategy tips on the blokus.com website), you would have seen that the first piece of advice was to head toward the center. This post will be about the… Read More »
If there is a single most important idea when trying to understand Blokus, then surely it must be the idea that Blokus is about space. If you have ever read the rules of Blokus that come with the physical board game, then you may have seen a section about strategy tips, the first of which… Read More »