Dots And Boxes Game

Dots and Boxes takes the game you've doodled on notebook paper a hundred times and turns it into a proper contest of foresight. The grid looks harmless — a scatter of dots waiting to be joined — but every line you draw either gives your opponent nothing or hands them a square, and the difference between those two outcomes is the entire game.

Play a quick match against the computer, with Normal or Hard difficulty, or share a screen with a friend in local two-player mode. Turns alternate one line at a time: draw a horizontal or vertical segment between two adjacent dots. Complete the fourth side of a box and you score it and get an extra turn immediately, which is what makes the endgame so tense — a single careless line can hand your opponent a chain of five or six boxes in a row.

Controls

Click (or tap, on a touchscreen) the space between two adjacent dots to draw a line there. The game highlights which lines are legal to draw as you move your cursor over the board.

Tips

• Don't complete the third side of a box unless you have to. Doing so hands your opponent a free square on their next turn.
• Learn the double-cross. When a chain of boxes is about to open up, don't take every box in it — leave the last two and draw a line that skips both. Your opponent is forced to take those two, then open the next chain for you.
• Count the long chains before the board fills up. Whoever controls how many three-plus-box chains exist usually controls who's forced to open the first one, which decides the match more often than raw square count early on.
• Against Hard difficulty, plan a few moves ahead rather than reacting. The computer plays close to optimally in the endgame, so mistakes in the last third of the board are punished immediately.

It's a short, sharp game — a few minutes against the computer, longer if you and a friend are both playing for keeps. No installs, just a board and a browser.