Players: 2
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
Travel Blokus comes with a gameboard and 42 playing pieces.
The Board: A gray plastic board with a 14x14 square grid on it. Two spaces are marked with circles: they're the starting spaces for the game.
Playing Pieces: 21 pieces each in the two player colors (orange and purple). Each is made out of clear (though colored) plastic. .
Rulebook: A 2-sided color rulesheet that's mostly diagrams and pictures. It's easy to learn from and provides some good references.
Overall the aesthetics of the clear plastic pieces against the silver-gray board are very attractive. They give the whole game a jewel-like look. I don't like the purples and oranges of this set as much as the reds, green, blues, and yellows of the original (in particular, the purple is very muted), but the core concept is still attractive.
It's also worth considering the "travel" element of the game. Everything does store in a pretty neat little box, and the pieces lock into ridges in the board. It'd probably be quite easy to play on a plane or in a car, other than the fact that you couldn't spread out your remaining pieces to remember what you had.
On the whole, Travel Blokus is an attractive and easy to use game. I've given it a high "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Travel Blokus is to place as many of your 21 geometric pieces as you can.
Setup: Each player takes his set of 21 shaped pieces.
On the first turn each player begins by placing one of his pieces with one of its squares on one of the starting points.
The Pieces. The 21 pieces are each a different shape. These shapes are between 1 and 5 squares in size. So, you have a tiny 1x1 square and a 1x2 line, etc., up through 3 and 4 square objects. There are 12 different 5-square shapes, such as a1x5 line, a plus, a "T", a long "L", etc
Because of their different shapes, each piece has different challenges in placement (and can offer different advantages).
Continuing Play: As play continues each player will, on his turn, place an additional piece. New pieces must go diagonally orthagonal to an existing piece of the same color. They can not touch along flat edges.
The rules of the game are that simple, but there's quite a bit of subtlety. You want to use your pieces to section off parts of the board, so that you can get to them and your opponent can't. You can sometimes cut your opponent off by wrapping your piece around the corners of your oppponent's, so that a new piece can't be placed next to it. (Purple did this some to orange in the photo at the head of this review.) Conversely, you can sometimes slip through your opponent's blocks because the diagonal placement always leaves some space open.
Small pieces can often get you out of tight spots, but you conversely want to use your large piecces as quickly as possible, as they can be hard to place later.
So, there's quite a bit of tactics to consider.
Ending the Game: When one player can't place any more pieces the other player continues on. The game finally ends when neither player can place anymore.
Each player has a negative score equal to the number of squares displaying on their unplayed pieces. (So, if you didn't play one of your 5-square pieces, that would be -5.) There's a +15 bonus if a player played everything and +5 if their 1-square was their last piece.
Highest score wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Travel Blokus is an abstract geometry game. It's of course related to the original Blokus, which had a slightly larger board and which allowed for 4 players. In Blokus you always started in the corner too; I think Travel Blokus having its start space inward on the board makes things immediately more interesting.
Rumis is a more chaotic three-dimensional game in a very similar style.
The Game Design
Travel Blokus is, at heart, a very skillful tactical game. There's a lot of opportunity for playing well on a turn-by-turn basis. Because of its strong tactical basis it really shines as an abstract game.
It's also very spatial, and people without a good spatial sense will have troubles with it.
I do think there's ultimately somewhat limited depth of play, as games often go somewhat similarly, and there isn't a huge amount of variety in overall strategy. However, you can't complain too much about that given that it's a 15-minute game.
However as a simple abstract Travel Blokus does quite well, and the Blokus system is rightfully a classic. I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
The travel version of Blokus does a great job of supporting 2-player play and indeed is packaged in a manner that will make travel play easy. The tactical play is already a classic, and well worth it if you like abstracts.
