Pencil & Games Plaza

Pencil and Paper Games are popular throughout every culture on this planet. Part of the reason lays in the simplicity of the material. Everyone with a pencil and some paper can play them. And some you can even play without pencil and paper - with a stick and a flat surface of sand you can play on it as well.

Pencil and paper games, perhaps not surprisingly, can be defined as those games for which one needs only a pencil and paper to play. To exclude oral games, one might wish to add the condition that pencil and paper are actually necessary.

I like to group these games in 3 or 4 categories:
Calculation games those games which have numbers as their main component
Geometrical games those games which need drawings, even if it's only a simple grid
Simulation games those games which simulate business, sports, or even war and can still be easily recorded by hand.
Word games because the large number of games which fit in this category, see the Word Game Plaza.


Calculation_Games:

Calculation games deal with numbers, and that's not everybody's favourite. But for those who like some mental exercise, their are a fair number of games.

These three games are deduction games, which means that essentially one player makes up a puzzle, and the other tries to solve it.


Geometrical games:

Many of the childrens classic games are geometrical games:

Besides these traditionals, there are many, many modern pencil and paper games:

Stop Gate by John Conway

Black Box

White Box

Col is all about colouring. This too is by John Conway.


Simulation Games:

I welcome contributions to these lists.