A full guide: how to draw edges between adjacent dots, close boxes, earn an extra turn for every box you close and capture more boxes than your opponent. Controls on muta.pro and tactics for beginners.
Dots and Boxes is a positional game about capturing boxes on a grid of dots. Players take turns drawing short lines (edges) between adjacent dots. Whoever draws the fourth, closing edge of a box claims that box. The goal is to capture more boxes than your opponent once the whole board is drawn in.
The board is a grid of dots; edges can be drawn between adjacent dots. The board size is chosen before the game — from compact to large. Each player has their own colour: captured boxes are filled with it. Players move in turn, starting with the first player.
On your turn, draw one line between two adjacent dots — horizontally or vertically. Hover the cursor over the segment and click.
When your line becomes the fourth side of a square, the box is filled with your colour and credited to you.
For every box you close you move again. A single move can close two boxes at once — and again earn you the right to move.
If your edge closes no box, the turn passes to your opponent.
Players draw edges until every box on the board is closed. No free lines remain — the game is over.
Count who has more captured boxes. That player wins the game.
Your score is the number of boxes in your colour; it is shown on the right with a coloured progress bar. The game continues until every box on the board is closed (the sum of both players' boxes equals the number of boxes in the grid). The player who captured more boxes wins; if they are level, a draw is declared. Because closing a box grants an extra turn, long chains of boxes can go entirely to one player — and that is what decides the outcome.
Try not to draw edges on boxes that already have two sides — otherwise your opponent closes the box on the next move.
A long chain of boxes goes entirely to whoever starts closing it. Plan who gets the long run.
Sometimes it pays to give up a couple of boxes to force your opponent to open a long chain for you.
Every closed box is an extra turn. Snap up boxes one after another without handing over the initiative.
Dots and Boxes only looks like harmless line-drawing — in reality it is a game of calculation. Experienced players barely think about the first moves: they think about how the board will break up into chains in the endgame. A chain is a row of boxes connected so that, once your opponent starts closing one end, they are forced to hand you the whole chain: every closed box grants an extra turn, and the hand naturally reaches to close the next.
The game splits into two phases. First comes the neutral phase: both players draw "safe" edges that don't give a box a third side. As soon as the safe moves run out, the opening phase begins — someone is obliged to open a chain. The whole strategy comes down to forcing your opponent to open first while you get the long chains.
Victory is decided not by the running total of boxes but by how many long chains there are and who gets them at the end. One long chain matters more than three single boxes.
On an N×N board of boxes there is an empirical rule: the first player wants an odd number of long chains, the second an even one. Keep this in mind when deciding where to cut the board.
Whoever first draws an edge inside a long chain gives it away. Drag out neutral moves, forcing your opponent to open up sooner.
A long chain of four boxes: whoever opens it first hands the opponent all four in a row.
The masters' key technique is the double-cross. When closing a chain, you do not take the last two boxes but sacrifice them, drawing one "through" edge. Your opponent takes those two boxes but must move again — and is forced to open the next chain for you. Thus you give up 2 boxes to get the whole next chain in full.
Without this technique the winner is whoever first got a long chain: they greedily take it and then open the next one themselves. The double-cross flips the logic — by giving up the initiative, you keep control. On a board with several long chains a series of such sacrifices decides the game: you lose a couple of boxes at each transition, but every new chain comes to you in full.
The double-cross: we take the first two boxes for ourselves, and deliberately leave the last two (gold) to the opponent with a single edge — they take them but are forced to open a new chain for you.
The player who forces the opponent to open chains "keeps control". The double-cross is a way to hand the unfavourable obligation to move back to the opponent.
The double-cross pays off only if the next chain is longer than two boxes. Giving up 2 to take 2 is pointless.
In a chain of two boxes there is nothing to sacrifice — just close both. Save the double-cross for long chains.
On muta.pro the grid size is set before the game with the buttons "4×4", "5×5", "6×6", "7×7". Size changes not only the length but the game itself: on a small board precise calculation decides almost everything, on a large one it is the skill of cutting the board into favourable chains. The bigger the grid, the more important it is to picture in advance how many chains the board will break into.
The parity rule works differently depending on who moves first, so the same size plays differently as the first and the second player. If you want to practise a specific technique, take a smaller board: there a mistake is visible at once and the game doesn't drag on.
A quick game of 16 boxes. The chains are short, everything can be calculated to the end — good for practising parity and the double-cross.
Enough room for long chains and sacrifices, but the game doesn't drag on. Here chain strategy comes fully into its own.
49 boxes, several independent chains and "loops" (closed cycles). Managing control becomes decisive.
A chain closed into a ring (a loop) requires you to sacrifice not two but four boxes in a double-cross. Account for this on large boards.
If you want to avoid a draw, pick a board with an odd total number of boxes — then the score can't come out level.
Almost all losses in Dots and Boxes come not from bad ideas but from automatic moves in the opening. A player mechanically closes everything that can be closed and opens everything that can be opened — and by the endgame is left without a single long chain. Let's look at the typical slips that gift chains to the opponent.
A dangerous box: it already has three sides. Whoever gave it a second side too early has gifted it to the opponent.