Torus Games

Eight familiar games introduce children ages 10 and up to the mind-stretching possibility of a “multiconnected universe”. Games include: tic-tac-toe, mazes, crossword puzzles, word search puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, chess, pool and gomoku. While playing the games, kids develop an intuitive visual understanding of a model universe that is finite yet has no boundary. Players who master the games in 2D may enjoy the extra challenge of solving 3D mazes and playing 3D tic-tac-toe in multiconnected 3D spaces. Even though the games were designed with kids in mind, adults interested in topology, geometry and cosmology have also found them enjoyable and enlightening.

Keywords: geometry, games, topology, torus, Klein bottle, 3D, maze, crossword, word search, jigsaw, chess, pool, tic-tac-toe