Quadtria

Quadtria is an elegant, and beautifully made two player strategy game from the one game company I have the most difficulty writing about - because I write for them - Out of the Box Publications.

My main bias-reduction strategy is our more or less weekly "Game Tastings." Despite my eagerness to play every game that comes in, I sat this one out and limited myself to comment-free observation.

What I observed is that the game looks a lot simpler than it is. Oh, it's easy to learn, all right. You move one piece at a time, along a comfortably smooth channel to the next satisfyingly inset pit. If you get any three of your five pieces to form a triangle in any of the four sections of the board, you win. Of course, triangles in your starting section don't count, at least not in the beginning of the game (or both players would win as soon as the game starts).

Perceiving triangles, however, turns out to be far more subtle than one would think. And this is really why the game became so intriguing, even to those of us who just kibbitzed. We kept on thinking that the game would prove to be trivial, that the next player would definitely win, only to discover that we were wrong.

They say the game takes from 5-35 minutes to play. Our first did in deed took five. Our second - yes, the players insisted on playing it again - a good 25 minutes. And I mean "good."

There are too few unique, easy-to-learn strategy games. Quadtria is definitely one of the few.