Territory & Blocking Games: Go, Othello, Blokus, Dots and Boxes, Amazons and DVONN

An idea two and a half thousand years old

Go is the source of this family and the oldest game on the site. Its earliest reliable written record is in the Zuo Zhuan, 548 BCE, where an idiom about hesitating over a stone shows the game was already familiar to the nobility. Its rules fit on one page — alternate placement, capture by removing liberties, no suicide, no repetition — and because none of them prescribes any particular shape, concepts such as life and death, ko, thickness and efficiency all grow out of the relations between stones rather than being written down.

Winning without eliminating your opponent is not a common idea in the history of board games. Most ancient games are decided by destruction or by trapping a king. Go defines the result as who enclosed more — which requires a scoring method, and which is why Chinese area scoring and Japanese/Korean territory scoring diverge, and why komi, a 20th-century compensation rule, exists at all.

Three different answers to holding ground

Othello (settled in Japan in 1971, descended from English Reversi of the 1880s) compresses territory into its most violent form: every move flips enemy pieces, and only the count at the final instant matters. A lead in the middlegame means nothing, and the last few moves routinely rewrite whole regions — which is why it takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.

Blokus (2000, France) and Dots and Boxes (1889, France, designed by Édouard Lucas as La Pipopipette) take the filling route: the first claims area with polyominoes that may only touch corner to corner, the second by drawing edges to close boxes. Dots and Boxes looks like a children's game and has a complete mathematical theory — the point is not to fill boxes but to use a two-box sacrifice to hand the last long chain to your opponent.

DVONN (2001, fourth in the GIPF series) ties scoring to stacking: at the end each stack counts for whoever owns the top piece. And every stack that has lost contact with a red DVONN piece is swept off the board at the close — an advantage built all midgame can vanish at once.

Another way to win: use up the space

Amazons (1988, Argentina, designed by Walter Zamkauskas and first published in the magazine El Acertijo) has no scoring and no capture: after moving, you fire an arrow that seals a square permanently. The board is eaten away one square at a time, and whoever is trapped first loses.

It is essentially Go stripped to its minimum — a contest over who leaves themselves more room. Because pieces never disappear and only squares do, its positions evolve in one direction only, which has made it one of the few territory-style abstracts outside Go to be studied in real depth.