When Blokus Trigon came out, I really didn’t see any reason to pick it up. I had already gotten the original Blokus and Travel Blokus. I felt like I had all of my Blokus bases covered. More than that, the tight game play of Travel Blokus was so good, I couldn’t see how triangles could make Blokus any better.

However, I’ve recently started to learn Go (and Go is one of those games that it takes years to learn how play). My tiny Go group is usually only three people. I had already taught everyone in the group how to play Blokus and they loved it but Blokus is poor with three players.

So, I went and picked up Blokus Trigon so we would have a balanced, three-player abstract that had at least some elements of Go. (My Go instructor insists that all games, even poker, have elements of Go in them. They’re pretty obvious in Blokus though.)

Blokus Trigon was pretty much an instant hit.

For those who have never played Blokus, the game is actually very simple. Well, simple as far as the rules go. Each player has a set of identical pieces, each in their own color. Players take turns placing their pieces on the board. After the first move, every piece that they place must touch another piece of their color but can never touch sides. When a player can no longer legally place a piece, they pass. After everyone passes, whoever covers the greatest area of the board wins. You can figure that out by counting up the pieces that didn’t make it onto the board.

In the first two Blokus games where the pieces were made up of squares, the placement meant that you could only touch corners. However, in Blokus Trigon, all of the pieces are made up of triangles which means you can have points touching sides, increasing the number of legal plays.

Like the other Blokus games, Blokus Trigon comes with top notch components. The board is a large silver hexagon made up of tiny triangles. The board is slotted so you can drop the pieces in and they’ll stay there. That also makes it very clear if a piece can actually fit where a player wants it to. Halfway towards the middle are six triangle symbols, which are the starting places. The outer ring of the board is a little grittier, making it easy to tell from the other spaces. In a three-player, you do not play on that ring.

Each player gets a set of twenty-two pieces in red, green, blue or yellow. Each piece is made up of one to six little triangles. I’m not sure if they represent every way you could put one to six triangles together but they make an impressive variety of shapes.

In case I didn’t explain it well enough earlier, when you’re counting up your unused pieces at the end of the game, you don’t count the number of pieces. You count the number of triangles that make up those pieces. Thus, a piece made up six triangles is effectively negative six points compared to a piece of three triangles which would only be worth three negative points. Generally, in my circles, we score it like golf and don’t worry about calling the number negative. We just say that whoever had the lowest number of points wins. In the rules, you can earn positive points by placing all your pieces but if someone has placed all their pieces, someone else wasn’t trying hard enough.

Okay, with all that said, I feel there are two big questions that need to be answered when approaching Blokus Trigon. First, how does it compare to the other two Blokus games? Second, how well does it play for three players?

First off, Blokus Trigon plays very differently than the other two games. I didn’t think triangles would be that differ that much from squares but it really does make a difference. I find it easy to look at squares and intuitively figure how they fit together. Triangles led to a greater variety of shapes, particularly since they have more ways to get around the no-sides-touching restriction.

However, Blokus Trigon is still grounded on the very strong ideas that make the other two Blokus games good games. Blokus Trigon is a very good abstract strategy game that is easy to teach but offers a lot of depth and replay value.

Second, Blokus Trigon plays VERY solidly with three people. Making the board smaller is a simple idea but it works very well. Unlike the accursed dummy hand you had to use when playing the original Blokus with three players, you only have three colors on the board and the board is very tight. I have seen the same idea used in Ingenious and it works well in both games. In fact, Blokus Trigon has become the closer of choice for my Go group.

Blokus Trigon has impressed me by being a very strong game and it filled my need for a three-player abstract incredibly well. I am very happy with it and, yes, I would recommend it to anyone.