Blokus is a very special board game. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Blokus is quite simple. Participants play on a gridded board upon which Tetris-like pieces are slotted in. The pieces fit into the gridded spaces, and players have to connect their colored pieces through corners, as demonstrated in the image above. You will notice that the same color pieces only touch corners, as having your pieces flush on any entire edge is against the rules.
Blokus can be extremely entertaining and ruthless because players can make a trail and invade other people’s space, causing them to eventually run out of moves. It becomes even more challenging to put down all your pieces when two players form an alliance; that is, up until they are the last two left.
However, this is not what sets Blokus apart. What makes the game especially intriguing is that four players can participate in the game, follow all the rules, and all four players can win.
Puzzlesland.com reports that there are perfectly legal ways for all players to put down all their pieces. As puzzlesland puts it, “Here’s what a game might look like if players were being cooperative rather than competitive:”
I find this fact quite fascinating, as it shows how integral competitiveness is to board games and their ability to entertain. Everyone can win in Blokus, and yet, in my experience, this scenario has never happened. And, frankly, I wonder if the game would even be enjoyable if this did occur.
In an article for NBC News titled “Why board games bring out the worst in us,” Nicole Spector writes, “…once engaged, our brains don’t really know it’s just a game…When we have a victory or experience a sense of bonding with our teammates, our brains release pleasurable chemicals.” Blokus makes me wonder if competitiveness (and the associated chemical reactions) has to deal with victory itself, or victory juxtaposed with failure.
Spoons, a card game involving the quick, stealthy taking of spoons until one person is left the loser, and Cockroach Poker are examples of games where multiple people become winners, and only one faces loss.
But what happens when a game has no loser? Such a result is comparable to participation awards in sports. These awards are generally seen as inferior, or even demeaning, as many feel that they reward players for not doing well. So I wonder if the same sentiment would be applied to an ‘everyone-wins’ board game, or if the “sense of bonding with our teammates” in sports that Nicole Spector brings up can work elsewhere.
In other words, can there be winners in a board game without losers?
My first reaction, having been raised in a competitive, capitalist society, is no. I would conclude that a game is not, in fact, as enjoyable when there are no losers. Perhaps this is an indicator of the reach of capitalist ideology, and perhaps the socialist conclusion is the opposite.
Nicole Spector writes in that same article, “Board games are designed to rile us up. Like sports, these games work by creating division. We adopt a “me versus them” mentality.” In contrast, Don Vaughn, a neuroscientist whom Spector interviews, states that “‘It is possible to get some of the neurochemical benefits of board games [including] the release of oxytocin (the ‘love’ hormone) from social connectedness.’” So which is it—are fun board games only possible when they sow division, or can they work by uniting people in a social manner?
Unlike Vaughn, I am not a neuroscientist capable of measuring neurological responses to competition, nor am I a philosopher here to question the ethics and morality of winners and losers. Nevertheless, I wonder if the case could be made for a game like Blokus in which the goal is to create scenarios like the one pictured above. Could a game based on cooperative victory be both enjoyable and successful in the mass market? Or, has the competitive win-lose dynamic infiltrated the board game industry beyond repair?
It’s tough to say. After some thought, I think a game like this could work really well. The important thing to note here is that competition can exist in a cooperative game. The Oxford English Dictionary defines competition as “An event or contest in which people take part in order to establish superiority or supremacy in a particular area.” Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong, and competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. Suppose a game is designed in such a way that participants are only “establishing supremacy” over themselves; in that case, you can get rid of the win-lose dynamic while retaining a competitive aspect. For example, a puzzle game in which participants have to work together to create as many solutions as possible, say, arranging shapes into a square in as many different ways as possible. Such a game would allow players to compete with the previous highest number of solutions, and yet, the game creates no losers. Furthermore, by doing away with the “me-versus-them mentality” that Spector mentions, a game like this would avoid the typical emotional drama that some other competitive games create.
And finally, there are categories of games that already exist that do away entirely with the competition aspect. Although I am not well-versed in any of them, there are hundreds of role-playing board games out there where the objective is to create an exciting storyline. Again, games like this provide entertainment for participants (and are very popular!) without requiring someone to lose.
Clearly, a board game without losers is possible. That’s irrefutable because such board games already exist. For now, the only question that remains is whether or not the massive market for competitive games that leave one player triumphant and the rest defeated will ever be made obsolete by the games that offer the same entertainment, minus the family-destroying win-lose drama. I’d love to poll my parents to know their opinions on the matter. Unfortunately, we’re not exactly on speaking terms after last night’s Monopoly. I won.