Pencil and paper games: Dots and Bugs

Pencil and paper games all share the property that each grid cell can only be used a very limited number of times (usually once or twice). Walter Joris is probably the game designer that most contributed to this genre with his 2002 book 100 Strategic Games for Pen and Paper. There's more recent Joris fun on his pinterest page.

Here are two pencil and paper games played in the Eastern bloc.

Dots. Played on a grid of any size - traditionally on a 39x32 grid typical of a squared copybook in Russia [wikipedia].

Each player draws a dot of his color on an empty intersection. If the player closes a chain of his own dots (including diagonal connections) and the interior includes at least one enemy dot, then the player connects his dots with lines. Those dots, including the inner area, are out of the game (let's say the player captures the area). The player scores one point per surrounded enemy dot. If the inner area does not have an enemy dot, then the player cannot capture that area. Also, if there are more than one option to close chains, the player must select just one of those to close.

When the board is full, the player with more points wins.

Usually, the game starts by playing a limited number of moves in a central area to prevent players moving initially in the borders (since those dots cannot be captured). A nice way to solve this problem would be to make a toroidal board, but at a probably high cost in clarity.

The wikipedia page mentions a variant that allows for knight-like connections, which encourages more offensive play. 

Another variant prevents a chain from scoring if it gets surrounded by a larger enemy chain.

An extra rule is the idea of Houses. A House is a chain that surrounds an area with only empty spaces. If the adversary moves there, and does not close a chain himself, then the House becomes a closed chain. This rule seems to open a cold phase at the endgame, when dots must be placed in the remaining intersections that penalize the players (getting the game closer to a no-pass Go).

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The second game is Клоподавка (Bug Supression) aka Virus War. Again, the game is played on a large grid. The players decide on a move budget (say N usually between 3 and 6) relative to the size of the grid.

Each player has a home base, each on opposite corners. On his turn, each player marks N squares on the grid. Markings can be on empty squares, or by shading a square marked by the adversary (let's call it a wall). A wall becomes unplayable. However, players can only mark or shade squares that have a connected path from their home bases. 

A player that cannot complete his move, loses the game.

In the following example (with N=6) Blue answered Red's early and over-extended attack by making four walls, cutting red walls from the rest of their army. Now, if Red wants to reconnect, he must spend four markings to get to his three walls.

play this game here

Virus is a very underrated game, I find it quite fun to play and surprisingly tactical. Perhaps the game is too decisive, being hard to counter an early advantage, but who knows what good players could make of it?