Paper and Pencil Games

TwixT is a two-player strategy board game invented by Alex Randolph. It belongs to the connection family of games, along with Hex, Havannah, Y, PÜNCT and *Star. TwixT was short-listed for the first Spiel des Jahres in 1979, and was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design's Hall of Fame, along with Randolph, in 2011.

Tic-tac-toe (also known as Noughts and crosses or Xs and Os) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game.

Tennis is an (abstract) strategic pencil and paper game for two players.

Sprouts is a pencil-and-paper game with significant mathematical properties. It was invented by mathematicians John Horton Conway and Michael S. Paterson at Cambridge University in the early 1960s.

Spellbinder (also known as Waving Hands) is a 1977 pencil-and-paper game invented by Richard Bartle and first published in his fanzine, Sauce of the Nile. It has since been re-created in a variety of formats, including software for the X Window System, play-by-email, Java applet, Android application, and web-based.

SOS is a (usually two-player but may be more) game played with paper and pencil. It is similar to tic-tac-toe but with more complexity.

Slitherlink (also known as Fences, Takegaki, Loop the Loop, Loopy, Ouroboros, Suriza and Dotty Dilemma) is a logic puzzle developed by publisher Nikoli.

The game of Sim is played by two players on a board consisting of six dots ('vertices'). Each dot is connected to every other dot by a line ('edge').

The Shannon switching game is an abstract strategy game for two players, invented by Claude Shannon. It is commonly played on a rectangular grid; this special case of the game was independently invented by David Gale and is also known as Gale or Bridg-It.

Racetrack is a paper and pencil game that simulates a car race, played by two or more players. The game is played on a squared sheet of paper, with a pencil line tracking each car's movement. The rules for moving represent a car with a certain inertia and physical limits on traction, and the resulting line is reminiscent of how real racing cars move. The game requires players to slow down before bends in the track, and requires some foresight and planning for successful play. The game is popular as an educational tool teaching vectors.

Race Game is a pencil and paper game, involving the pencil flick action.

Picture consequences is a circle game in which a group of people cooperatively draw a person. It takes about 20 minutes to play. It was played by the Surrealists, where it was known as exquisite corpse, although that name also described other games. The person is drawn in portions, with the paper folded after each portion so that later participants cannot see earlier portions. It has been recommended for use as a tool for teaching about tattoos. Picture consequences can be used to practice vocabulary and to encourage a class to work together. The game is also recommended as a "rainy day" game. The point of the game is the surprise reveal at the end or for simple fun.

Pencil flick is a move used in some games that involves pressing a pencil or pen onto a sheet of papyrus or paper until it gives way and 'flicks' across the surface. The resulting line then affects the gameplay in some way. Race Game is an example of a game using the pencil flick. It is also used in military-based games whereby the pencil flick represents gunfire/movement. The 'flick' action can be incorporated into many types of game.

Patterns II is a pencil and paper game developed by Sid Sackson for 3 or more players. It emphasizes the use of inductive logic and scientific analysis to discover a hidden pattern of symbols within a matrix of grid spaces.

Paper Soccer (or P&P Soccer or Paper Hockey, or Paper Football or Logic Football) is a pencil and paper game for two players. In Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Romania, Germany and other countries the game is popular among school children and students. There are several variations of this game. Here the two most distinct versions are described:

Order and Chaos is a variant of the game tic-tac-toe. It was introduced by Stephen Sniderman in Games Magazine in 1981.

MASH is a two-player paper-and-pencil game, commonly played by preteens intended to predict one's future. The name is an abbreviation of "Mansion, Apartment, Shack/Street/Shed/Sewers, and House". The game can be expanded to "DMASH" (the D standing for Dome) or "MASHO" (O standing for outhouse or Ottoman)

Lexicant is a paper and pencil word game for two players. A letter is written on a sheet of paper, and each player takes turns adding a letter either to the beginning or the end of this ever-growing word stem. Any word-stem a player creates must form part of a valid English word, without actually being a word itself. The first player to create a word (with at least three or four letters) loses.

Labyrinth, also known as Terra Incognita, is a game played on paper. Any number of 3 or more players can participate: one player, known as the "leader", designs the labyrinth and tells players about where they can and cannot go, and whether they have reached a prize, treasure, hole, &c., while the other players traverse the labyrinth and try to get to the treasure.

Jotto (sometimes Giotto Dżiotto) is a logic-oriented word game played with two players, a writing implement, and a piece of paper. Each player picks a secret word of five letters (that is in the dictionary, generally no proper nouns are allowed, and generally consisting of all different letters), and the object of the game is to correctly guess the other player's word first. Players take turns guessing and giving the number of Jots, or the number of letters that are in both the guessed word and the secret word. The positions of the letters don't matter: for example, if the secret word is OTHER and a player guesses PEACH, he gets a reply of 2 (for the E and the H, even though they're in the wrong positions). Using a written-out alphabet, players cross out letters that are eliminated with Jot counts of 0 and other logical deductions.

Join Five (also known as Morpion solitaire, Cross 'n' Lines or Line Game) is a paper and pencil game for one or two players, played on a plus-shaped grid of dots. The origins of the game are probably in northern Europe. References to the game first appeared in French publications in the 1970s. In addition to being played recreationally, the game has been the subject of theoretical studies and computer searches for solutions.

Hex is a strategy board game played on a hexagonal grid, theoretically of any size and several possible shapes, but traditionally as an 11×11 rhombus. Other popular dimensions are 13×13 and 19×19 as a result of the game's relationship to the older game of Go. According to the book A Beautiful Mind, John Nash (one of the game's inventors) advocated 14×14 as the optimal size.

Hangman is a paper and pencil guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase or sentence and the other tries to guess it by suggesting letters or numbers, within a certain number of guesses.

Hackenbush is a two-player mathematical game that may be played on any configuration of colored line segments connected to one another by their endpoints and to a "ground" line.

Gomoku is an abstract strategy board game. Also called Gobang or Five in a Row, it is traditionally played with Go pieces (black and white stones) on a go board with 15x15 intersections; however, because once placed, pieces are not moved or removed from the board; gomoku may also be played as a paper and pencil game. This game is known in several countries under different names.

Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun", as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

Dots and boxes (also known as Boxes, Squares, Paddocks, Pigs in a Pen, Square-it, Dots and Dashes, Dit Dot Dash, Dots, Line Game, Smart Dots, Dot Boxing, or, simply, the Dot Game) is a pencil and paper game for two players (or sometimes, more than two) first published in 1889 by Édouard Lucas.

Dots (Czech: Židi, Polish: Kropki, Russian: Точки) is an abstract strategy game, generally played by two (or more) people on a sheet of squared paper. At first glance, the rules of this game can seem similar to those of Go. But there are some major differences, resulting in two completely different games. Instead of territory control, as in Go, the primary target of dots is capturing enemy dots by surrounding them with a continuous line of one's own dots. Once surrounded, dots are not playable.

'Stop-Gate' redirects here. For the waterway feature also called stop gates, see floodgate

Cram is a mathematical game played on a sheet of graph paper. It is the impartial version of Domineering and the only difference in the rules is that each player may place their dominoes in either orientation, but it results in a very different game. It has been called by many names, including "plugg" by Geoffrey Mott-Smith, and "dots-and-pairs." Cram was popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American.

Consequences is an old parlour game in a similar vein to the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and Mad Libs.

Connect6 (Chinese: 六子棋; Pinyin: liùzǐqí; Japanese: 六目並べ; Korean: 육목) introduced in 2003 by Professor I-Chen Wu at Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, is a two-player strategy game similar to Gomoku.

Connect Four (also known as Captain's Mistress, Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Fourplay, Four in a Row and Four in a Line) is a two-player connection game in which the players first choose a color and then take turns dropping colored discs from the top into a seven-column, six-row vertically suspended grid. The pieces fall straight down, occupying the next available space within the column. The objective of the game is to connect four of one's own discs of the same color next to each other vertically, horizontally, or diagonally before your opponent. Connect Four is a strongly solved game. The first player can always win by playing the right moves.

Col is a pencil and paper game, specifically a map-coloring game, involving the shading of areas in a line drawing according to the rules of Graph coloring. With each move, the graph must remain proper (no two areas of the same colour may touch), and a player who cannot make a legal move loses. The game was described and analysed by John Conway, who attributed it to Colin Vout, in On Numbers and Games.

Chomp is a two-player strategy game played on a rectangular chocolate bar made up of smaller square blocks (cells). The players take it in turns to choose one block and "eat it" (remove from the board), together with those that are below it and to its right. The top left block is "poisoned" and the player who eats this loses.

The "Charlie Charlie" game is a modern incarnation of a Spanish paper-and-pencil game called Juego de la Lapicera (game of the pens). Like a Magic 8-Ball, the game is played by teenagers using school supplies to produce answers to questions they ask. Teenage girls have played Juego de la Lapicera for generations in Spain and Hispanic America, asking which boys in their class fancy them. Originally described on the internet in 2008, the game was popularized in the English-speaking world in 2015, partly through the hashtag #CharlieCharlieChallenge. On 29 April 2015, an alarmist tabloid television newscast about the game being played in Hato Mayor Province of the Dominican Republic was uploaded to YouTube, and the unintentional humor in the report led to the game trending on Twitter, crossing the language barrier to be played around the world.

Bulls and Cows (also known as Cows and Bulls or Pigs and Bulls or Bulls and Cleots) is an old code-breaking mind or paper and pencil game for two or more players, predating the similar commercially marketed board game Mastermind.

Boggle is a word game designed by Allan Turoff and originally distributed by Parker Brothers. The game is played using a plastic grid of lettered dice, in which players attempt to find words in sequences of adjacent letters.

Beetle is a British party game in which one draws a beetle in parts. The game may be played solely with pen, paper and a die or using a commercial game set, some of which contain custom scorepads and dice and others which contain pieces which snap together to make a beetle/bug. It is sometimes called Cooties or Bugs. The game is entirely based on random die rolls, with no skill involved.

Battleship (also Battleships or Sea Battle) is a guessing game for two players. It is known worldwide as a pencil and paper game which dates from World War I. It was published by various companies as a pad-and-pencil game in the 1930s, and was released as a plastic board game by Milton Bradley in 1967.

Paper-and-pencil games are games that can be played solely with paper and pencil (or other writing implement), usually without erasing.