The History of Blocked Path
Blocked Path is a race game at PaperGames; it takes up old elements of dice race games such as sending tokens home and blocking the way.
Old race games
Race games, in which pieces move by dice along a track towards a goal, are among the oldest board games; the Royal Game of Ur is the oldest game whose rules have been handed down. Sending home and blocking are old ideas too: in Pachisi a piece that lands on an opponent's piece sends it back to the start, and in Backgammon a wall of pieces on consecutive points, called a prime, keeps the opponent's pieces behind it.
Blocked Path at PaperGames
At PaperGames, Blocked Path is played on a network of paths with 49 fields and the goal at the top, with six blocks and up to six players. A block that is hit is not removed but placed again, so the way to the goal keeps changing. The houses come onto the board at fields that are equally far from the goal, and the tokens differ by shape rather than colour, so the game works on black-and-white e-ink.
The quick board is a smaller board of PaperGames' own, made for shorter games; rest fields, on which a token cannot be sent back, take the place of the safe lower half.