Do you want to practice traveling in a two-, three- or even four-dimensional world? If you stretch your imagination, you can do it! Follow the simple rules of “The Fly Game” and practice your spatial cognition in a multi-dimensional environment. The game is great for kids, adults, or as a parent-child activity. I remember myself as a kid playing this imagination game with my father – we could play it for hours, getting better and better. We started with a simple two-dimensional flat word, and at some point, it became too easy for us – so we added additional difficulty levels and dimensions, to make it more fun. Who knows, maybe you will be able to reach even a five-dimensional world!
The rules are as follows: two (or more) players imagine a 3×3 board, in a flat two-dimensional world. A fly is resting in the middle square, denoted with a solid X in the image below:
The game is played in turns, one player at a time. The player whose turn to play moves the fly to an adjacent cell by announcing verbally what move he wants the fly to do. He can choose the fly to go one cell in one of the four directions: forward, backward, left, or right. After that, the turn ends and moves to the next player. The next player has to imagine where the fly is located now, after the previous turn, and validate that it didn’t fell out of the board.
If the fly felt out of the board, the player who did this move loses. If the fly is still on the board, the game continues, and the players continue to move the fly one cell at a time, until one of them loses track, forgets the fly’s location, and accidentally throws it out of the board by deciding to move it through the game borders.
The game improves the players’ imagination, sense of direction, memory, focus, and spatial cognition. Of course, if you mastered the above version, you can add additional difficulty levels: you can have more than two players, so each one has to remember and imagine more moves until it’s his turn to play; you can announce moves that are longer than a single cell, for example: move two cells forward, one cell left, and one cell backward; you can have a bigger board (e.g., 5×5) or, you can move to a three-dimensional world:
In a three-dimensional world, you have three boards, one atop of the other. Now the fly can move not only forward, backward, left, and right, but also up and down, flying between the boards. Pay attention, that if the fly is in the upper board, it cannot move any higher, and if it is in the lower board; it cannot move any lower.
I bet that this variation will require a bit more practice to master, but if even that is not enough, move the fly into a four-dimensional world! A four-dimensional world is the same as a three-dimensional world, but now you have three sets of three-dimensional boards, and you can also go “inside” and “outside”, traveling between the sets of boards, that are located in different dimensions. Just like in the picture below:
Now you have six directions or so-called, “degrees of freedom”: forward, backward, left, right, up, down, inside, and outside. That surely will be challenging enough, but if not, I dare you to try a five-dimensional version. Imagining such a version is left as an exercise to the master-player.
If any assistance is needed in imagining two-, three-, four- or even five-dimensional versions of the game, if you are lost in an unknown dimension, or if you are stuck between dimensions and can’t find your way out, leave a comment, and a rescue team will head to your dimension right away!
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