Qubic is the brand name of a four-in-a-row game played in a 4×4×4 matrix sold by Parker Brothers starting in 1953. [1] The original box, and the 1972 reissue, described the game as "Parker Brothers 3D Tic Tac Toe Game." Players take turn placing pieces to get four in a row horizontally or diagonally on a single board—or vertically in a column or diagonal line across four boards.
The four boards were made of clear plastic (in a simple square design in the original release and in a funkier design for the 1972 reissue) with circular playing pieces that resembled small poker chips in red, blue, and yellow; each player used a single color. Markers could be placed in any unoccupied position, rather than stacked in a pile on a square as in Score Four. The game is no longer manufactured.
Either two or three players could participate in a game. In two-person play, the first player will win if there are two optimal players. There are 76 winning lines. The 16 positions lying at the 4 space diagonals (8 corners and 8 internal positions) are equivalent and each involved in 7 winning lines; the other 48 positions (24 face positions and 24 edge positions) are also equivalent, each being involved in four winning lines. (The equivalence of a corner and an internal position is via an inversion; likewise for a face and an edge position.) The game was weakly solved by Eugene Mahalko in 1976, Oren Patashnik in 1980 and then solved again by Victor Allis using proof-number search. A plotter based 3D computer game was written by Arthur Hu and Carl Hu in 1975 on a HP 9830 in Lindbergh High School . It used four stacked trapezoids. It was later ported to the HP 2647 demo tape with a graphical interface, using a simple mathematical transform to solve for 3D input position. It also was included in the Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack in the 1990s as part of TicTactics.
Contents |
The cube structure makes the 8 corner-points and 8 centre-points extremely important; each of these is a member of 6 planes [flat, 2xvertical, 2xdiagonal-vertical, 1xcross-vertical) of 16 points. O places his first peg A on one of the 16 powerpoints provided that X does not place his peg at a powerpoint then the second B on one of the 5 available powerpoints; the third peg C goes on one of the three available planes which include A & B. X cannot block all these options. Once A,B & C are placed there is a forced win after a further 5 pegs.
|.A...x3....3....B
|.1....5.....2....w
|x1...x2....4.....
|.C........x4....w