Paper & Pencil Games "Sprouts", "Pipelayer", "Capture" on http://orion.math.iastate.edu Sprouts starts with three (or more) dots on a piece of paper. The animation over to the right is playing a game a sprouts. The rules are as follows: the players take turns moving, a move has two parts: drawing a line and making a new dot. The line must go from a dot to a dot so that it does not cross another line and so that once the line is draw, no dot has more then three lines coming out of it. The animated game marks these used-up dots with red X's. You might want to circle used-up dots... (Read more about Sprouts ...)
Pipelayer Pipelayer is a game played with two grids of dots that are slightly offset from one another, as shown in the animation at the right. We will call them white and black dots. This examples has 6x7 and 7x6 grids of dots, but you can use more or less as long as they leave each player with one longer dimension. The long dimension should be one longer than the short dimension...
The players take turns moving by connecting two dots.
A player can only connect dots that are adjacent horizontally or vertically and also only dots of his own color. In the example the blue player owns the white dots and the red player owns the black dots.
No move may draw across another move.
To win a player must make a continuous connection from one side of the board to the other in the long direction for his color of dots. For the blue player in the example this is from left to right; the red player is trying to connect top to bottom. The blue player wins the example game and then his connecting path from left to right lights up yellow.
