How to play Dots and Boxes
- Take turns drawing one line between two neighboring dots — tap anywhere along the gap you want to fill.
- Draw the fourth side of a little square and the box is yours: it fills in your color, you score a point, and you draw again. Chain a few closings and the turns keep coming.
- Never hand over a box: drawing the third side of any square is an invitation. Early game is all about drawing lines that touch nothing.
- Endgame is chain-counting. The board becomes corridors of boxes, and whoever is forced to open a corridor first feeds the whole thing to the other pen. The sneakiest players even give away two boxes on purpose to keep control (ask a mathematician about the "double-cross").
- All lines drawn — most boxes wins. Our grids are odd-sided (3×3, 5×5, 7×7), so there's no such thing as a tie.
A little background
Dots and boxes is the classroom classic that has survived on the back pages of notebooks for well over a century — the French mathematician Édouard Lucas published it in 1889 as La Pipopipette. It needs nothing but graph paper and two pens, which is exactly how it's drawn here: cream paper, faint blue rules, and lines with a hand-drawn wobble. Under the doodles hides real mathematics — the chain-and-sacrifice endgame has filled actual textbooks.
Play it the rainy-afternoon way — pass one phone and groan every time a chain collapses — or start a duel: two devices, one live sheet, every stroke appearing on both screens. Pick your battlefield from a quick 3×3 to a full 7×7 marathon. Free, no ads, no account — pass & play works offline too.