Sprouts

Sprouts

FSprouts was invented by the mathematicians M. S. Paterson and John H. Conway in 1967. It is a 2 person strategic game played and all you need is paper and 2 colored pens.

1. Draw two or three dots on the paper, spaced out a bit. They can really be anywhere you want.

2. The first player draws a line that joins two of the spots, and makes a new spot in the middle of the line. (You can make a line joining one spot to itself also.)

3. The second player draws his line and makes a new spot.

The rules are:

 a. You can’t make a line that crosses another line and  
 b. Only three lines per spot, coming to or from it. In other words no spot can have more than 3 lines attached to it. 

4. The winner is the last person to draw a spot

The game is remarkably complicated, and even starting with two spots leads to an interesting game.

In the following sample game with two spots Blue has the first move, and Red wins after 4 moves because Blue has no move:

This is with 4 dots