Quarto is a board game

Board game

A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...

 for two players invented by Swiss mathematician Blaise Müller.

It is played on a 4×4 board. There are 16 unique pieces, each of which is either:

• tall or short;
• red or blue (or some other pair of colors, such as light or dark stained wood);
• square or circular; and
• hollow or solid.

Players take turns choosing a piece which the other player must then place on the board. A player wins by placing a piece on the board which forms a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row of four pieces, all of which have a common attribute (all short, all circular, etc.). A variant rule included in many editions gives a second way to win by placing 4 matching pieces in a 2x2 square.

Quarto is distinctive in that there is only one set of common pieces, rather than a set for one player and a different set for the other. It is therefore an impartial game

Impartial game

In combinatorial game theory, an impartial game is a game in which the allowable moves depend only on the position and not on which of the two players is currently moving, and where the payoffs are symmetric...

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External links

• Quarto: Play online against the computer
• Quarto: Quarto and other board games
• www.hagru.at: Variation named Cuatro for the PC (Java)
• 414298141056 Quarto Draws Suffice! at MathPages
• Quarto!: Desktop version made in Java.
• Lineo': Windows and Linux version of Quarto with network play and 3D look
• Quarto: Quarto and other Brain Fitness Games