We’ve been playing the Blokus Duo game for a while now with Sal. He’s picked up on the strategy pretty quickly so when we were traveling I thought it’d be nice to be able to bring Blokus along without the risk of losing any of the pieces on the airplane and such. We were actually in Chicago’s Midway airport when I bought this off the app store. It is one of the more expensive apps we’ve bought, but we figured it is better than losing some of the pieces on a road trip.
The game is a fine implementation of the board game, with both the 4 player mode and the 2 color duo mode. The only problem with it is that multiplayer on one device isn’t supported. You need two devices to play multiplayer. And even that was kind of a hassle to get up and running via bluetooth.
They have an online leaderboard and lobby, if you want to play strangers and advance your game, but that’s geared more towards the hard core Blokus folk and not the casual gamer that’s teaching their children planning and strategy. Though it is another way to play multiplayer. And theoretically I could play with Sal while I was at work and he was at home. Long term, I can see that as being a benefit.
As it stands, it is still a great tool to strategize together against the CPU opponents and it is a way for me to teach planning and strategies without it seeming like I’m taking it easy on him. So that is a benefit to the single player per device mode. But I still wish it had the multiplayer on a single device mode. Maybe they’ll update it, now that the iPad makes that option even more viable.
Cost: $1.99
