Beautifully simple game by Alex Cheddar for two people or solo and described here with permission. There is a small amount of setting up required, but as it could be created using just pencil and paper and some cutting out it’s included here.
You will need 16-18 equally sized square tiles which you can write on. Tiles that are 2-3cm square and easily handled work well. You can cut these out of paper/card/wood. On one side of the tiles write either an “F”, “O” or “X” in pencil or pen. Alex suggests the following number of tiles depending on whether you play the one player or two player version
| One player | Two players | |
| F’s | x5 | x6 |
| O’s | x6 | x6 |
| X’s | x5 | x6 |
In the one player version having 6 O’s is apparently slightly more difficult, so if you want it a bit easier use 6 F’s or 6 X’s instead. For two players create 6 of each letter (F, O and X), shuffle the tiles face down and each player selects 9 tiles each. For both the one and two player versions, tiles remain face down and hidden until played.
On a piece of paper or a playing surface, draw a 4 x 4 grid of squares the same size or slightly larger than the tiles.
One-player version:
Randomly select a face-down tile and place on the grid filling up left to right from the top.
You need to avoid creating the word ‘FOX’ in any direction (eg left-right, right-left, diagonally, top to bottom, bottom to top). If you do find a FOX then you stop and start again. Reshuffle the tiles face down each time.
See how many goes it takes before you complete the grid before ‘Not finding the fox’. Apparently, it’s about 12% chance of doing so.
The OOOO version
This is another one-player version. Start off by placing four of the O’s on the grid in a diagonal pattern from top-left to bottom-right. ie in squares 1, 6, 11 and 16 (Figure 2).
Shuffle the remaining tiles face-down, then randomly select tiles. Turning them face up you can place them anywhere on the grid. Once in place, they cannot be moved. Keep selecting tiles and placing them on the grid while trying and avoid spelling out FOX anywhere. Game play stops if you do. If you can complete the grid without spelling FOX anywhere you have succeeded.
Two-player version:
Each player takes two tiles from their 9 and places them face down in the corners closest to them. These are the ‘Mystery tiles’ (Figure 3)
Players then take turns randomly selecting a tile from the remainder of their face-down tiles. Players can look at the tile and choose where to place it on the grid without creating the word FOX.
Mystery tiles are turned over whenever some squares adjacent to them are at risk of creating the word FOX.
The first person to create the word FOX looses.
Online
Want a go at trying this online? Alex has his own site where you can have a go at both the classic and the ‘OOOO’ versions
https://donotfindthefox.com/classic
Alex also has a number of YouTube videos demonstrating gameplay.
