It was Ella's move.
Zoe, Clementine and I were staring so intently at the board, each silently willing Ella to use her turn to block someone else, that we didn't hear the front door open.
As Ella's fingers fiendishly skipped over the irregularly shaped plastic pieces at her disposal — the cube, the cross, the lightning bolt — Clementine had a terrible premonition.
"No, no, no," she begged her older sister.
Ella ignored her. She chose the dreaded horseshoe, which she placed on the board — with great deliberation — to encircle Clementine's only open piece, eliminating all hope of escape.
Ella cackled. The spell broke in the next instant, as Clementine declared her undying hatred for Ella and rushed from the room, Zoe called to her to come back because there was another move she had overlooked, and Ella uttered a terrible, triumphant oath: "Blokus!"
I looked up and noticed my husband standing in the doorway.
He looked shaken.
"Thank God we're going out of town next week," he said. "You need a break from Blokus."
Usually my husband loves board games. He was the one, after all, who packed our Carcassonne tiles in a Ziploc bag to take along to France.
But Blokus rubs him the wrong way. He says he dislikes the very aspect of the game that appeals so much to the rest of us, the fact that winning requires excellent spatial skills. A successful player is strategic enough to envision various ways the 21 different geometric shapes could be linked together to keep marching across the board even as they block an opponent's progress.
I smiled neutrally at my husband. There was no reason to upset him, as we were about to embark with Zoe on a four-day trip to visit colleges, with the news that I had bought online a travel version of Blokus ($19.99 at Funagain.com). I wouldn't say I was hiding anything. I would say, however, that I was being strategic. And I doubted it would interest him to know that the compact, two-player version had a board small enough to fit on an airplane tray table. So the next day, as we boarded a plane for Chicago, I surreptitiously slid the plastic-wrapped box into the seat-back pouch in front of me.
I hoped he would come around. After all, he had shown a soft spot for other miniature, compact versions of board games. In the past, he had enjoyed Travel Mancala (available for $9.98 at Areyougame.com), Travel Battleship ($14.99 at Hasbro.com) and even magnetic checkers ($6.95 at Boardgames.com). He's been known to browse the travel category at Boardgamesexpress.com and has in fact become unnaturally attached to the site's travel Scrabble version ($18.95), with its miniature letters that snap in place to prevent turbulence from messing up the board.
Given his history, I persuaded myself I might even be doing my husband a favor by staging, at an altitude of 30,000 feet, what in effect would be a Blokus intervention. He would discover that playing Blokus was a lovely, relaxing way to avoid boredom during a four-hour flight. By the time the plane landed, he would even be as thrilled as I had been to learn about Travel Blokus's bombshells, including the rule requiring the first piece to be played in the middle of the board rather than in a corner.
Or would he?
I knew I had to introduce the idea of midair Blokus in a nonthreatening way. To prepare, I had sought advice from Merry Vediner, an experienced Blokus player who works at the online game store Funagain.com.
"In general, my husband likes to play family board games," I told her over the phone.
"I've always looked at games as a bridge to bring children into a family," said Ms. Vediner, who has over the years played many, many board games with her offspring and foster children. "I always look for games that you have to be present to play, not games where you can leave the room and ask someone else to take your turn and know it doesn't matter."
Blokus certainly fell into the first category.
"My daughters and I like to play a quick, cutthroat round of Blokus at the kitchen table to relax before dinner," I said.
"It appeals to the math part of your brain," Ms. Vediner said helpfully.
"There's some bickering when we play, of course," I said. "But I don't know why my husband doesn't like it."
"He walks in the room and he's looking at a pool of Blokus sharks?" Ms. Vediner asked.
"That's one way of looking at it, I guess," I said. "Usually nobody runs from the table in tears."
"That's good," Ms. Vediner said encouragingly.
"Except that one time when all the other players ganged up on...." I stopped.
I cleared my throat. "So how can I persuade him that it's really fun and good for the family?" I asked.
"Well, the history of the game is really interesting," she said. "Supposedly a French abstract painter did a marvelous big painting and then to make a frame cut out colored pieces for the frame and then stood back and looked at the pattern the pieces made and realized, 'That's a game.' "
"I'll tell him," I said.
Before hanging up, Ms. Vediner gave me one more piece of advice. "Lost Cities is a wonderful travel game," she said. "It's a card game that would fit on a lap table, a two-person game where you are trying to build a suit of colors and trading your gems."
I told her I might try Lost Cities next. But first, I planned to enact my stealth Blokus plan.
On the plane, after takeoff I lowered my tray table and asked, "Does anyone want to play a game?"
"Sure," Zoe said.
"I thought you'd never ask," my husband said. But before I could spring Blokus on him, he pulled a black zippered case from his own seat-back pouch, opened it and asked, "Scrabble, anyone?"
He really would be good at Blokus.