Explosive Dots Paper and Pen Game

Per part of an in-class exercise, Ashely and I decided to improve upon the game that many refer to as Dots. In traditional dots, you make a grid of dots on a piece of paper, and each player takes turns drawing lines to connect them. When a player completes a box, they get a point and take an additional turn. The game ends when the grid has been filled with boxes.

To improve upon this game, we added two rules. The first rule is that when a player completes a box, instead of taking an additional turn, they can instead erase one line on the grid, as long as it is not part of a completed box. The second rule is that whenever a player creates a 2×2 cube of boxes, they can “bomb” any box that belongs to their opponent. This erases all of the lines of that box and all other adjacent boxes of theirs, as long as they do not belong to the player dropping the “bomb.”

In gameplay, it is actually fairly rare to get to “drop a bomb.” However, as observed in play-testing, the simple fact that this rule exists significantly changes the way in which the game is played. Whereas in traditional Dots, there comes a point where players need to draw lines that will certainly give a box (or boxes) their opponent, in Explosive Dots the tension is much greater and requires greater thought and strategy to be sure that you do not give your opponent the proper boxes to form the 2×2 cube. This also offers a possibility for redemption. Because of this, a game can last much longer, as large portions of the grid can be reset, allowing for another player to take the lead.

The game I got to test-play was titled Hangman’s Revival. As the title suggests, it is based on the classic Hangman game, only in this version, if you get two letters correct in a row, you earn “extra lives” which can be used if the entirety of the stick-figure person is drawn before you can guess all of the letters. At first, we played using fairly common words with no more than seven or eight letters before we ran out of time for this activity during class. It was right at the end of this that I realized that this game would be very effective when playing using long, complex, or uncommon words. Had we had more time in class I may have opened up a dictionary and found a word at least twelve letters long.