Have you ever played Dobble in your life? It’s not a question or a supposition but a statement: one million copies sold in Spain give an idea of the fame of this board game that has gone through all possible variations, from absolutely impossible versions (Astérix, Disney, The Mandalorian, Paw Patrol) to XXL or Waterproof editions, ready to play in the pool. If you haven’t placed it yet, it’s that game where you have to find the matching symbol on two cards before your opponent does. Because yes, there’s always a match. Always. And don’t think it’s just a coincidence.
Solving problems
To understand how Dobble started, we have to go back to the year 1850. No, it’s not that they were big gamers back then; it was in that year when Thomas Pennington Kirkman posed his famous “Problem of the Schoolgirls.” Don’t think badly of him; he was a reverend. The problem was as follows: “Fifteen young girls in a school leave in groups of three for seven consecutive days: they must be paired daily so that at the end of the week, no two girls have been together more than once.” Challenging, right?
In 1976, Jacques Cottereau, an enthusiast of the problem, created his own version: 31 cards, each with six images of insects. Thanks to the projective geometry formed by the Fano plane, only one insect was repeated on each pair of cards drawn. In a burst of imagination, he called it “The Insect Game” and put it in a drawer until 32 years later when a journalist, Denis Blanchot, found some of the cards and decided to borrow the concept to create his own game. It was 2008, and that’s how ‘Dobble’ was born.
In ‘Dobble,’ there are eight symbols per card (except in the kids’ version) in 55 different cards. And it may seem like magic, but yes, there’s always at least one repeated symbol. Pure and simple mathematics have created an immortal game with as many versions as there are days in a year (and more to come), including cooperative and competitive editions. In other words, it takes up very little space, and if you have young children, not having it around during the summer is almost a mortal sin. And if, out of curiosity, you try to understand the mathematical operations that led to completing the game, you might end up seeing… dobble.
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