UNIQ

An original pen-and-paper game you can play vs the AI.

This game too, like DAAR which I published earlier, comes from a pen-and-paper game that had already appeared in an old Italian puzzle magazine, Focus Brain Trainer.

In the original version, however, there was an instant-death rule: the first player to complete a shape that already existed would lose. I preferred to introduce a scoring system that assigns penalties based on the number of squares in the repeated shape, and I think the game has improved because of it.

The AI’s strategy isn’t perfect, but it feels suitable for teaching a game you can play anytime with just pen and paper. A friend pointed out that the AI almost always starts with the same move, but in practice there are only two possible types of openings, since the first move has to touch the edge.