Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Blokus Solitaire Success

Yes, it can be done.  The rules of the excellent game Blokus describe a solitaire version where you play the game with all of the normal rules, except one person is playing for all four colors and is attempting to get every single piece onto the board.  It is a difficult task to complete.  I'd tried it and failed at a least a couple of times before I succeeded.  Naturally, I took a picture in case there are any skeptics out there.  And, yes, I did manage to place the "dot" piece last for all four colors.

Knowing how hard it is, I went in to this exercise slowly and as I placed pieces, I tried hard to imagine what other pieces I would later place between them.  So, you can see that the corners are tightly packed where my plans worked well, but it got much messier as things moved into the middle.

I think that Blokus solitaire can retain the all important re-playability.  What I suggest is that once you've solved it starting with one particular piece, you try it again starting with another piece.  Therefore, this is my "Z" solution, since I used the Z-piece to start off each color.  (...  Of course, you could start the different colors off with different pieces, but that will make it quite a bit more difficult.  One step at a time.)

Update:  A cleaner image of this solution:

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