The History of Dots and Boxes
A pencil-and-paper game more than a century old, and a genuine subject of serious mathematical study.
A 19th-Century French Puzzle
Dots and Boxes was first described in print in the 1880s by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, who is better known today for his work in number theory (including the Lucas numbers) and for inventing the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. Lucas wrote about the game under the French name "la pipopipette".
Needing nothing but a pencil and a grid of dots, the game spread the way most paper-and-pencil games do: informally, through classrooms and notebooks, long before anyone thought to trademark or manufacture it.
Becoming "Dots and Boxes"
In English-speaking countries the game came to be known simply as Dots and Boxes (also Dots and Squares, or Boxes), the name most players today would recognize, even though its documented history stretches back to Lucas's 19th-century French description.
A Serious Subject in Game Theory
Despite its simplicity, Dots and Boxes turned out to have surprisingly deep strategy, and it became a favorite case study in combinatorial game theory. Mathematician Elwyn Berlekamp - together with John Conway and Richard Guy in their landmark book "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays" - formally analyzed the game's endgame, including the "double-cross strategy" and the "long chain rule": the idea that a skilled player deliberately sacrifices a couple of boxes at the end of a chain to keep control of who is forced to open the next one.
Berlekamp later wrote an entire book devoted to the game, "The Dots and Boxes Game: Sophisticated Child's Play", laying out just how much strategic depth hides behind a game simple enough for children to learn in a minute.