Blokus

Exploring the game of Blokus with Game Theory, Software Engineering, and a bit of AI. This project was developed with PyGame and Python. Further advancements will include PyTorch, Scikit-learn, etc.

Understanding the Game of Blokus

Blokus is a two to four player abstract strategy board game where players score points by occupying the board with their colored polyomino pieces.

The grid is 20×20 square grid (400 total squares). The game includes 84 tiles, made up of 21 unique shapes in each of four colors: blue, yellow, red, and green.

Tiles

• Each player has the same 21 shapes.
• The shapes are all possible free polyominoes made from 1 to 5 squares:
  • 1 monomino
  • 1 domino
  • 2 trominoes
  • 5 tetrominoes
  • 12 pentominoes

Rules of Play

Turn Order

• Players take turns in the following color order: Blue → Yellow → Red → Green.

Placement Rules

• The first tile of each color must be placed in one of the four board corners.
• Every new tile must:
  • Touch at least one tile of the same color at a corner.
  • Never touch tiles of the same color along an edge (corner contact only).
• Tiles of different colors may touch freely, including edge-to-edge.

Game Flow

• If a player cannot place any remaining tile, they are skipped for the rest of the game.
• The game ends when no player can make a legal move.

Scoring

• Each unplayed square counts as −1 point.
  • Example: an unplayed tetromino scores −4 points.
• Bonus points:
  • +15 points for playing all tiles.
  • +5 additional points if the last tile played is the monomino.
• The player with the highest total score wins.