Graphing the Berry Patch (UMAP)

As part of the promotion for its new Berry Berry Kix cereal, General Mills included on the cereal box a game called "Berry Patch Scramble," which turns out to be a pretty good game for children or mathematicians. It has elements in common with the Chinese and Korean children's game Pong Hau K'i [Bell 1979] and the Maori game Mu Torere [Ascher 1987, 1991], and it is amenable to the same kind of graph-theoretic analysis as in Straffin [1995]. The Packaging Group at General Mills invented Berry Patch Scramble as a group effort; they are unaware of any knowledge of other games that might have unconciously influenced them and are quite sure they have never heard of Mu Torere or Pong Hau K'i [Summer 1996].