BoxOff Game

BoxOff was invented in January 2013 by Steven Meyers, a warehouse worker in Cincinnati, Ohio. He conceived of it as a remove-a-pair game in which the requirement would be maximally stringent — that is, the entire spatial relationship must be free of other pieces. Although the idea is generalizable to n dimensions, it was quickly clear that a 2D format would provide the best combination of depth and playability.

 

The first two people that Steven notified were Cameron Browne, a computer scientist, and R. Wayne Schmittberger, the editor of GAMES magazine. Cameron suggested the name BoxOff, and Wayne offered to feature it in the magazine (appearing in the August 2013 issue). Cameron soon co-authored a paper on BoxOff with Frederic Maire, detailing some mathematical and sampling results. The paper, called "Monte Carlo Analysis of a Puzzle Game," was presented at a conference on artificial intelligence.

 

An iOS app for BoxOff was created by Michael Gilbert, published in 2014 but no longer available. An Android app was published in 2016, a combined effort by Damian Walker, Greg Schmidt and some of the programmers at Lampros Labs, a Cincinnati-area IT firm. The Android app is still available for all but the most recent devices.

 

In 2020 BoxOff appeared in an article in Abstract Games magazine, written by the editor, Kerry Handscomb. In 2021 the paper BoxOff is NP-complete was published by Ryan Hayward, Mahya Jamshidian and Robert A. Hearn. It details some computational complexity results involving the game.

 

Over the course of a few years, Steven contacted a dozen or so board game publishers in hopes of getting BoxOff manufactured. He met with no luck and gave up for a while.

 

In late 2022, Steven came across the website of NewVenture Games, a small game manufacturer based in Michigan. He liked the manner in which they presented their product line, so he sent David a small set for him to try out. David liked it, and in October 2023 he ran a BoxOff Kickstarter campaign with his business partner, Scott Bultman of Red Hen Toys. The game became available two months leter.