Game 53: Quixo

 Quixo (pronounced "key-so") is an award-winning game of pure strategy.  As a family we tend to focus on games that have more of a story to them, such as Stoneage or Settler's of Catan or Karuba or Escape from Atlantis, but every so often I need to get back to pure strategy.  Jacob is out gaming with friends from work tonight leaving David and me home together, and this was our choice of game for our evening. It had been quite a while since we played it, so we had to take out the rules and pursue them for clarity on a couple of things, but the rules are very simple, and within minutes we were ready to get started.
 This game brought to mind a special day that my oldest son and I had many years ago.  It was a day when everyone else was back to school, but he and I weren't yet.  We decided to play all the games we owned that started with the letter Q in one day, and I posted about that on my general blog, a post which you can find at this link.  We called it our "Qool Day."  As it turns out that event was 11 years ago yesterday!  Where does time go?!
 The game consists of a board with a square indentation in the middle in which 25 cubes sit loosely.  Each cube has one X on it and one O on it, but the other faces are blank.  To begin with a player takes a cube from an edge, turns it to his symbol, and places it at the end of a row (or column) in such a way that he can push the cubes to fill the empty space left by the removal.
 A player may only select a blank cube or a cube with his own symbol on it to remove and push.  The goal is to get five in a row of your symbol.
This game was a win for Xs (me!!). which surprised me, as David almost always wins games that involve visualizing territory.  Now that we've refreshed on the rules I'll have to give him another chance ;-)

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