Pen and Paper Games

Pen and paper games are played only using paper and a pen, or any other writing implement. No erasing is allowed. It gives hours of fun. Adults and children can play for hours.  Need to keep kids busy?  Try these games.  It brings back memories from my childhood and I am sure many of you have played some of these games also!

Noughts and Crosses
Players: Two - Also known as: Tic-tac-toe

Players take turns in marking squares on a 3 x 3 grid. The first player to get three squares in a row wins.
Description

This is probably the best known pencil and paper game.

The game is played on a 3 x 3 grid, typically created by drawing two horizontal lines and two vertical lines on a piece of paper. One player is 'O' and the other is 'X'.

Players take turns in drawing their symbol in one of the cells. The first player to make a line of three of their symbol horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins.

If both players play perfectly the outcome is always a draw, but with inexperienced players the game is just complex enough to make the game interesting.
Example:

For example, the following game shows how the first player can force a win by starting in the centre square if the second player is foolish enough to reply on the edge:

Dots and Boxes
Players: Two

Players take turns in drawing lines between dots on a grid. The player who completes the most boxes wins.

Description
The game is played starting with a rectangular array of dots.

The two players take turns to join two adjacent dots with a horizontal or vertical line. If a player completes the fourth side of a box they initial that box and must draw another line.

When all the boxes have been completed the winner is the player who has initialled the most boxes.

The game is more complex than it initially appears, and even on a 4x4 grid there is plenty of opportunity for skilful play.
Example

The following game on a 3x3 grid is won by Blue, who scores 3 against Red's one:

Battleships
Players: Two - Also known as: Broadsides

Players take turns in trying to guess the locations of the other player's ships on a grid.

Description
Each player draws two 10 x 10 grids, labelled along the sides with letters and numbers. On the left-hand grid the player secretly draws rectangles representing their fleet of ships:

The fleet
Each player's fleet consists of the following ships:
1 x Aircraft carrier - 5 squares
1 x Battleship - 4 squares
1 x Cruiser - 3 squares
2 x Destroyers - 2 squares each
2 x Submarines - 1 square each

Each ship occupies a number of adjacent squares on the grid, horizontally or vertically.
Play

During play the players take turns is making a shot at the opponent, by calling out the coordinates of a square (eg D5). The opponent responds with "hit" if it hits a ship or "miss" if it misses. If the player has hit the last remaining square of a ship the opponent must announce the name of the ship; eg "You sank my battleship".

During play each player should record their opponent's shots on the left-hand grid, and their shots on the right-hand grid as "X" for a hit and "O" for a miss:

The first player to lose all their ships loses the game.




Hangman
requires
2 to 4 players
Pen and paper

Game Play
One player thinks of a word or phrase; the others try to guess what it is one letter at a time. The player draws a number of dashes equivalent to the number of letters in the word. If a guessing player suggests a letter that occurs in the word, the other player fills in the blanks with that letter in the right places. If the word does not contain the suggested letter, the other player draws one element of a hangman's gallows. As the game progresses, a segment of the gallows and of a victim is added for every suggested letter not in the word. The number of incorrect guesses before the game ends is up to the players, but completing a character in a noose provides a minimum of six wrong answers until the game ends. The first player to guess the correct answer thinks of the word for the next game.

Objective
Guess the word/phrase before your man gets hung!




Sprouts
The game
The game of Sprouts was invented in 1967 by two mathematicians John H. Conway and Michael S. Paterson, when they were both at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The game was popularised by one of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" columns in Scientific American. Here is a quote from Conway:
"The day after sprouts sprouted, it seemed that everyone was playing it, at coffee or tea times, there were little groups of people peering over ridiculous to fantastic sprout positions."
Sprouts is a game for two players. All you really need is paper and a pencil.. The game starts by drawing any number of spots. In this example we are going to look at 3 spots.

The first player has a turn by joining two of the spots and marking a new spot in the middle of the line. Or the line may start and end on the same spot.

Rules:

You are not allowed to draw a line which crosses another line. This is important to remember!
A spot cannot have more than three lines leading to or from it. For example, in the game below, spots A and B cannot be used any more because they already have three lines.

The idea is to make it impossible for the other player to draw a line.
So the last person to draw a line is the winner.