L-Game With Wood Board

L-game is a simple strategic board game for two players, invented by Edward de Bono.

It is composed by a 4 x 4 square board, two L pieces (one of each player) and two neutral pieces 1 x 1.

The starting arrangement is shown in the upper picture. On each turn, a player must first move its L piece and, optionally, he can move either one of the neutral pieces in a free position. The pieces cannot be overlapped and the L piece can be rotated and also flipped upside-down. The only rule is that it must be placed in a different position: it is enough just to cover at least one new square on the board. The game is won by a player when there is no free position for the opponent to place its L piece.

You can find more details and the analysis of the game on Wikipedia.

Supplies

You just need three small wood boards, wood cutting tools, sand paper.

We cut boards with dimensions 16 cm x 16 cm, and two pieces with dimensions 12 cm x 8 cm. Each unit is 4 cm x 4 cm.

Eventually, you can use 8" x 8" and 6" x 4". In this case the unit square is 2" x 2".

After the final sending, we oiled the pieces with linseed oil to highlight the grain of the wood.

Step 1: Board and Pieces

You can build a wood version as shown in these pictures. It is a very simple wood crafting, and it is ideal as a starting project for a kid, as I did.

For the board, we cut a square piece with dimensions 16 cm x 16 cm, and engraved a grid (three horizontal lines and three vertical) with a grinding wheel for wood.

We cut two wood pieces with dimensions 12 cm x 8 cm, and then we cut the L shape. In this way you also obtain four neutral square pieces. You just need two of them, thus you can keep the other two as spare. I suggest to use a dark wood for the first L piece, and a light one for the other.

Step 2: An Example of a Quick Match

In this step I show and example of a quick match composed by only four moves.

As you can see in the third step the white L is flipped, and in the fourth step the white loses since there is no a new free position for its L-piece.

Step 3: Conclusion and Variant

In principle the color of the neutral pieces does not matter, but I also realized you can play L-game with a variant rule: you use two different neutral pieces (dark and light)… well, they are no more neutral then... and the player can eventually move only the 1 x 1 square of the same color of its L piece.

Although simple, this board game is not trivial and playing and learning the strategies is more amusing of what you can believe!