Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

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Pen and paper games were quite widespread among Soviet/Russian math olympiad participiants, and sadly these games are practically unknown outside of these circles. Tochki (dots) is probably the most well known, and it even has a Wikipedia article. Klopy (bedbugs) is a much more advanced game, but it's very obscure. The rules were passed orally and probably not written anywhere. It's a multiplayer game, usually for 4 players, which start in each corner of a sheet of squared paper, which is the base (represented by completely filled square). At each turn a player can put a fixed number of "bugs" (represented by X crosses) which can be placed next to a base or your own bug. Instead of placing a bug, you can turn a neighboring enemy bug into your base. I probably don't remember all the rules right now, but that's the gist of it. The games with many players are extremely fun and involve a lot of strategy and diplomacy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_(game)

EDIT: I found the Russian wikipedia article for the second game (I was searching for the wrong name): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BE... . Looks like I forgot the rule that each base must be "activated" (have at least a single bug next to it) to produce new bugs.

I have some fond memories of playing a few graph-paper based games in my childhood (Hungary).

One was an open map version of tic tac toe, where the goal was to get 5 of your symbol in a line. This game was called "amoeba", and if you won, you got to draw an outline around the board so far (which tended to look like an amoeba).

Another one was a kind of racing game. You'd draw the boundaries racing track on graph paper, where the race track would be several blocks wide at all points. Players would start near each other at the starting line, and get to update their velocity by one in both the x and y axes, so effectively you carried a lot of momentum. If you went out of the allowed area, you lost. So, the game revolved around being able to judge the maximum speed / momentum that would still allow you to take the corner.

Later on, I lived in other countries, and never ran into so many of these pen and graph paper games. No idea why.

I implemented the vector racing game as a Flash game many years ago

http://www.kongregate.com/games/GeometricGames/vector-race

I played that version of Tic Tac Toe growing up in Russia as well, but we just called it "krestiki-noliki" (crosses-and-noughts). My mom taught it to me after the simple 3x3 grid got too boring.

Interesting. There were a lot of Cold War-era abstract strategy games produced in the Slavic countries that just seem to be invisible these days, and many of them are quite interesting. Here's a draft English Wikipedia page for this game, if you can improve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Klopodavka

Having never played or heard of the game before this, I am hesitant to edit the page. However, I played the game for a few hours with a large group of kids from 5-15 years old, and we found that if you allow bugs to be squashed if they're adjacent to a fortress, it leads to a kind of contagion where nobody places any new bugs after the first contact is established, and all chains of bugs are just squashed all the way back to the home base. Restricting the squash operation to only situations where a friendly bug is adjacent to an enemy bug solved the problem and led to much more interesting play. I put a note on the talk page for the wikipedia draft, but perhaps someone who has played the game before can comment on this?

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