Land Grab

Land Grab is a homebrew minigame for the Nintendo 64 by Meeq (Christopher Bonhage) which was released on 13 December 2024. It’s an N64 port of the game Blokus, where you have to fill a grid with as many polyominoes as possible.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Land Grab

Land Grab is based off of the board game Blokus. You start by placing a piece in the corner of the board and the objective of the game is to cover as much of it as possible with your pieces. However, you can’t overlap with any of your opponents’ pieces and they can only be placed diagonally (not adjacent at all) to one of your other pieces.

You start with 21 pieces, one for each unique polyomino (monomino, domino, tromino, tetromino and pentomino) and a score of -89 (the sum of all the blocks yet to be played). Each player puts down a piece until they either run out or there is no longer any space to place anything, then the game ends and the player with the highest score (or lowest negative score) wins.

Strategy & AI

The general strategy is to place as many of the pentominos out as soon as possible since they grant the most points, are harder to place later in the game and let you block other players faster. The smaller pieces are better for the late game since they are easier to place, and can even let you navigate between enemy blocks to find better places to put your pieces.

The difficulty is quite clever. The hard AI works kind of like the strategy mentioned above, but with no foresight looking at opponent’s pieces. It basically picks a piece at random starting from the largest and tries to place it anywhere it can. Medium will try to place a random 4-5 size piece, then 2-3 and finally the single monomino. The easy AI will pick any piece of size 2-5 meaning it will likely not be able to use its larger pieces when the time comes.

Credits

The game was made by Christopher Bonhage / Meeq, using some stock fonts and audio.

Review and conclusion

Land Grab sets out what it was meant to do – be a Nintendo 64 port of Blokus. The controls work well and there aren’t any glaring glitches that I could find in it either.

The only possible issue is that the controls are a bit unintuitive. The first time playing I remember getting the “+” pentomino first which is impossible to place in a corner and was very confusing for a first time player since I was placing it as far into the corner as possible. Once you get the hang of the rules though, it becomes a pleasure to play though.

The AI serves its purpose to play the game according to the rules, but due to its inherent randomness, it doesn’t really pose much of a challenge. Even at higher difficulties, It’s pretty easy to win consistently.

The game is quite complete, so the only additions I would have liked to have seen is perhaps some kind of animation when moving, rotating, flipping or switching pieces around to make it feel a bit more dynamic. Also if there was a lot more time available, it would have been nice to see this game made in 3D. But that’s really just nitpicking.

Overall, Land Grab is a faithful reproduction of the classic Blokus game that serves its purpose well, but be sure to have a human opponent if you really want a challenge.