Review: Blokus

Introduction & Overview

Stake your claim and protect your territory with the Blokus board game! There’s less than a minute to learn, but it guarantees hours and hours of fun and strategy for the whole family!

This is how Blokus is presented to us, a design by Bernard Tavitian (Arlecchino, Nexos). First published in the year 2000 by Sekkoïa in a French edition.

It is published in Spanish by Mattel. It allows for games of 2 to 4 players, with a suggested minimum age of 7 years and an approximate duration of 30 minutes. The suggested retail price is €29.99. For this review, a review copy of Mattel’s English version has been used.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Components

Inside a single-piece folding cardboard box measuring 26.7×26.7×3.8 cm (similar dimensions to Azul, although with less depth), we find the following elements:

Board (plastic)
84 Polyominoes (21 of each color) (plastic)
Rulebook

How to Play

Blokus is an abstract game in which each player aims to fit as many of their 21 pieces as possible onto a grid board. At the start of the game, each participant chooses a color and, starting from one of the corners of the board, players alternate turns clockwise to place a single piece. The fundamental placement rule dictates that each newly placed piece must touch at least one other piece of the same color, but solely and exclusively at the corners, being completely forbidden to share sides, while pieces of different colors can touch without any restrictions. As the board becomes crowded, players who do not have legal space to place any of their shapes must pass their turn, with the rest continuing until no one can place any more pieces. Once the game ends, points are tallied based on the remaining pieces (where each piece subtracts as many points as its number of squares) and bonuses are awarded if a player has managed to place all their pieces and/or if the last piece placed is the single-square one. The player with the highest score is declared the winner.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the Pieces. Each participant has an identical set of 21 translucent pieces in their respective color. They are polyominoes of various dimensions (from one up to five squares), that is, geometric shapes composed of squares joined together. Each player’s goal is to try to place all their pieces. At the end of the game (when all players can no longer place any pieces), a final scoring takes place in which players score (negative) points for unplaced pieces, with two scoring systems available (in the basic one, points are scored for the squares of the unplaced pieces, while in the advanced one, bonuses are obtained for placing all pieces and, additionally, having placed the smallest piece last).

On the other hand, we have the Board. A grid surface on which players will deploy their pieces. Each player will start in one of the corners by placing one of their first pieces, and the rest must be deployed following the game’s basic connection rule, which prevents a player’s own polyominoes from connecting orthogonally to each other, meaning they must do so via their corners.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

The game board is placed in the center of the table within reach of all players.
Each player chooses a color among blue, yellow, red, and green and receives the set of 21 pieces corresponding to their color.
The players decide which scoring system they are going to use (basic or advanced).
The starting player is chosen randomly.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Blokus plays out over an indeterminate number of turns alternated by the players, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise.

On their turn, the active player must place one of their pieces. The player chooses a piece from their reserve and places it in an empty space on the main board while respecting the placement rules. Once placed, the piece cannot be moved.

After this, the turn immediately passes to the next player. If at any point a player has no legal moves or cannot place any of their pieces on the board, they must pass their turn.

To place the pieces, the following rules must be met:

First piece. The first piece placed by each player at the start of the game must mandatory cover one of the corners of the board.
Corner-to-corner connection. Each new piece placed on subsequent turns must touch at least one other piece of the same color, but solely and exclusively corner-to-corner.
Forbidden edges. Pieces belonging to the same color can never touch by sharing a side or the squares of their polyominoes.
Contact between colors. There is no restriction whatsoever for contact between pieces of different colors, so they can freely touch both side-to-side and corner-to-corner.

Game End

The game concludes when no player can place any more pieces on the board (everyone passes consecutively). At that moment, points are tallied to determine the winner using one of the two available systems:

Basic scoring:
- Each unplaced piece subtracts as many points as its number of squares.
Advanced scoring:
- Each unplaced piece subtracts as many points as its number of squares.
- The player adds 15 points if they managed to place all 21 pieces of their color on the board.
- The player adds 5 additional points if, besides placing all their pieces, the last piece played on the board was the single-square one.

The player with the most positive points (or fewest negative points) will be the winner. In case of a tie, the victory is shared.

Variants

Two-player mode. One player controls the blue and red colors, while the opponent handles yellow and green. The turn order follows the fixed sequence: blue, yellow, red, and green. At the end of the game, the score is calculated by adding up the remaining pieces of both colors controlled.

Three-player mode. Each participant chooses a color. The established order remains blue, yellow, red, and green. The remaining fourth color acts as a shared color that players alternate to place on their respective turns. At the end of the game, the score is calculated in the standard way, completely ignoring the result of the shared color.

Personal Opinion

When we dive into the wonderful world of board games, we tend to put aside mainstream publishers that release the titles with the widest reach. Labels like Hasbro, Mattel, or Goliath fall into the background because, generally speaking, the games they publish lose appeal for hobbyists.

However, these publishers are aware that there is an expanding market that they cannot ignore, which is why there is a steady release pace of titles that could actually be interesting for those of us who have already spent a few years navigating BGG and logging plays.

Today we are going to talk about Blokus, one of those titles that abstract game lovers in particular should keep on their radar if they don’t already, or, if they know about its existence, haven’t paid attention to it as soon as they saw it was published by Mattel, which we associate more with Barbie, Hot Wheels, or UNO than anything else.

In Blokus, each player’s goal is to try to deploy a set of plastic pieces as efficiently as possible on a shared grid board. These pieces come in the form of polyominoes—geometric figures resulting from connecting orthogonally adjacent squares, ranging from one to five squares.

The key to the game lies in the placement restriction. Unlike most games involving polyominoes, players must deploy their pieces by connecting them to each other exclusively corner-to-corner. This means that each placed piece must ensure that at least one of its squares touches another of their pieces diagonally, with it being strictly forbidden for two pieces of the same player to connect orthogonally through any square.

Usually, in designs that involve deploying polyominoes on a board, the goal is to be as tidy as possible to avoid leaving empty spaces, as seen in Patchwork (here is my tocho-review), A Feast for Odin (here is my tocho-review), The Isle of Cats (here is my tocho-review), or Bärenpark (here is my tocho-review).

This is because, in those designs, it is customary for each player to have a personal player board to carry out this deployment. However, in Blokus, as a true abstract game—meaning perfect information, absence of random elements, and a fight for positioning on a shared board—players must deploy their pieces on a common grid.

If each player focused on trying to occupy the smallest area possible with their pieces, the game would have no interest. But of course, by forcing players to place their polyominoes connected corner-to-corner, as turns progress, the board will start to look like a mosaic that has lost half its tiles, with a large amount of empty spaces between the already placed polyominoes.

This leads to a game where each player actually has only half of the board squares available. But of course, for any specific square, you don’t know beforehand if it will end up within that subset of “available” squares or fall into the “blocked” pile.

This is where the brutal interaction of this tactical abstract comes in. Naturally, players will quickly expand towards the center of the board to gain room to maneuver. This causes rival pieces to swiftly start deploying in adjacent spaces and, with it, block future moves if they occupy the squares diagonally adjacent to the corners of rival pieces.

But simultaneously, you have to try to take advantage of the gaps left behind by each player, as if it were a narrow maze where you must try to fit just the right pieces to continue exploiting the available pathways. As a result, managing your personal reserve is highly demanding.

Most of the pieces each player starts with have a size of five, meaning they occupy five squares. Since these carry the heaviest penalty, players should try to place them as early as possible. That is why when a player spots a sequence of pieces that could fit into lanes left by an opponent, they will momentarily hold onto those pieces, since it is unlikely that a third player will occupy that lane.

As the board fills up, players’ options shrink, and they will have to start relying on smaller pieces. Ideally, if playing with the advanced scoring mode (which doesn’t alter the core gameplay mechanics at all), you should try to save the single-square tile for the end, though it will often serve as a small lifesaver that allows you to advance through a lane that would otherwise be closed off.

In this way, players alternate turns in a snappy and ruthless game until they run out of options when placing pieces. This should already give you a hint about its scalability. Blokus works best at four players, where every single turn is a minor dilemma to unravel. At two players, it is true that it becomes somewhat more strategic, and players can take advantage of the synergy between the two colors they control (which act alternately). Where I don’t enjoy it at all is at three players, where the unowned color is managed collectively.

As for replayability, as a tactical game for four players, it is one of those designs that can hit the table very easily due to its brisk pace and lack of downtime. Furthermore, since the level of interaction is moderately intense, very diverse games emerge, with initial turns that feel like probing but lay the groundwork for what the game will become, moving into a second half where every nook and cranny you manage to exploit feels like a minor triumph.

To offer some alternatives, for me, Blokus competes in the same league as games like Through the Desert (here is my tocho-review), even though it doesn’t feature polyominoes, or Cathedral, where the mechanisms are very simple but give rise to continuous friction among players looking to position themselves while simultaneously blocking their opponents’ progress.

Let’s move on to the production, perhaps the weakest aspect of the game. Here it is obvious that the company holding the rights is a toy manufacturer that isn’t looking to attract gamers through production quality. Thus, we find plastic components that, while functional, feel a bit too cheap to the touch. Not to mention the box, which in current versions is a single-piece design with flimsy transparencies and weak inserts (it damages very easily). The rulebook is well-structured and leaves no room for doubt.

And let’s wrap this up. Blokus is a vibrant tactical abstract that camouflages a ruthless and fast-paced positional conflict beneath its apparent family-friendly simplicity. The subtle yet restrictive deployment of polyominoes, forced to connect solely corner-to-corner, gives rise to spatial control dynamics with brutal interaction, transforming the shared board into a tight maze of constant blocking. Managing your personal reserve becomes a top priority, forcing players to prioritize larger pieces before opponents close off their escape routes. Although games begin with a harmless, probing pace, the second half of the gameplay mutates into a tense crossroads where every conquered niche feels like an authentic tactical triumph. An incredibly elegant design that offers dynamic turns, ideal for those seeking a direct, fluid challenge packed with mean spikes. For all these reasons, I give it a…