The classic line-drawing game with the lights off, where you only learn your rival's moves when a box closes.
Take turns drawing one line between two adjacent dots. Complete the fourth side of a box to claim it and take another turn. The twist: your opponent's lines stay invisible until they close a box, so you play with incomplete information.
Dots and boxes was published by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas in the 1890s under the name la pipopipette, and its deep game is not about claiming boxes but about chains — whoever is first forced to open a long chain usually loses.
The original change is that your opponent's lines are invisible until they close a box.
That breaks the chain theory completely. The whole double-cross strategy depends on being able to count the chains on the board; hide half the lines and you cannot know how long a chain is, so the expert play of the parent game becomes a guess about a structure you can only infer.
Boxes Blackout is an original free browser twist on the classic dots-and-boxes pencil game, adding hidden information for fresh tension. No download required.