Boxes? Connect The Dots?
You make a grid of dots on paper. Two players take turns connect them with lines. If a player completes a box, he puts his initial in it and makes another line. The object is to have the most boxes with your initial in them. What’s this game called?
We called it ‘dots.’
And since we are here, what are other games you can play with a pencil and paper? Hangman comes to mind. Any other?
It’s called Dots and Boxes. (Or I should say one of several names it goes by.)
Nice!
Bots? Doxes?
We called it “fences”
We called it ‘boxes’ in my youth, but my country-bred spouse has gotten me into the habit of saying ‘paddocks’ which is a much more interesting name
And it’s actually fiendishly more strategic than you probably realize. Just read the Wikipedia article, particularly the “double-cross” strategy. Once you realize this strategy is possible, the game, which first seems quite random, gets massively more complicated.
My favorite pencil-n-paper game when I was a kid was a war game. I’m not sure it had a real name. I think my friends and I made the game up. This was when I was in the 6th and 7th grade, in the early 1970s.
To play, you and a friend had a piece of paper between you, and you drew a little island at each end of the paper. On that island, you would put your flag, which was a box with an “X” on it. Then, you drew a little ship outline somewhere near the island, followed by 3, 4, or 5 airplanes, which were just crosses. One side would be a simple cross while the other side would put a little mark on the wingtips, just so the planes looked a little different. I remember playing a few games that had 1 or 2 anti-aircraft guns on the island, as well.
The object was to take out the other guy’s flag.
On your turn, you declared if you were moving or shooting. To do either, you placed the point of your pencil on your boat or on your plane, stood it straight up balancing it with your finger, and lowered your finger, shooting the pencil across the paper so it made a mark. It might go an inch or two at the most. On a successful “move”, you scratched out the old position and drew the plane at the end of the pencil mark.
To shoot another plane (or to strafe the boat), you announced “shoot”, and did the same thing. If the pencil line went all the way through the target, the opposing boat or plane was erased.
To attack the flag, you had to drop a bomb on it. To drop a bomb, you had to fly a plane over the island and perform a “move” that went intersected the flag. If you were successful, you lifted your pencil about two feet off the table and dropped it, point down, hoping to hit the flag. If the pencil mark was inside the flag, you had successfully bombed the capital and the game was over.
The boat had a special power: it could either move twice per turn, or it could move once and shoot once. The boat’s job was to protect the island, and it could roam around and try to shoot down the ships. To move twice, you slid the pencil and then did another slide from the end of the first mark.
The anti-aircraft guns could not move, but they could shoot twice per turn. Like moving twice, they would fire a shot and then fire the second shot from the end of the first mark. The remarkable thing about the artillery fire was that the shells could go any way; because of the inaccuracy of sliding a pencil, your second part of the shot might be at an angle from the first part of the shot.
It was considered de rigueur to make shooting sounds, bomb whistles, and explosive noises during the game!
I remember one epic battle when three of us were at one guy’s house, and his dad had a print shop. We found a couple of scrap pieces of newsprint, about two feet wide and four feet long! We had a 3-way battle going on that took about an hour to play.
Man, I haven’t thought about that game in years! Thanks for the opportunity to reminisce. Now, get off my lawn.
By the way … the trick was to use the softest pencil you could find. I fondly remember going to the stationery store and telling my mom I needed a new Faber-Castell 4B pencil.