Much to my amusement, we recently saw Blokus for sale at a Five Below, which is a chain of Five and Dimes updated for inflation. It was clearly a budget version of the game so I had to get it to see how it was
To be honest, I was half expecting it to be made of card board.
Fortunately, it is plastic.
What was actually in the box was a tiny Blokus Duo. The board is a fiveish inch square and it is still slotted. However, it’s all bland, opaque plastic with none of the silver or transparent that is Blokis’s signature look.
Still, it’s a perfectly functional version of Blokus, which is what you really want out of a budget edition. The pieces are small enough to make me a little reluctant to declare it a travel version. The plane hits some turbulence and you will never see some of the pieces ever again.
Blokus Duo has been reprinted as a Travel Blokus and the second edition of Blokus Junior. I think it’s become the default flavor of Blokus, which makes sense. It tightens up the game play compared to the original game while still using squares.
The lesson I take from this is not that there’s an edition of Blokus that will fit into a coat pocket. It’s that Blokus has reached the point where a budget edition at Five Below is economically viable. (I also saw Sushi Go and Catan Dice on the same shelf so we have come along way from just having flimsy checker sets and Tic Tac Toe as our budget options)
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