How to make Origami Tetris Blocks (Tetrominoes)
Designed by Jo Nakashima (07/2019)
Difficulty level: simple

Tetris is a video game created by russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 (wikipedia). In this game, the player should make lines by positioning differently shaped pieces (the tetrominoes), which descend onto the playing field. There are seven different tetrominoes (or five, if you don’t count the mirrored ones).

I created the origami Tetris Blocks from my basic origami Seamless Cube. You can connect the cubes side by side to form the tetrominoes using its tabs and pockets.

Paper

In this tutorial I’m using 12cm x 12cm sheet of origami paper per cube. You’ll need 4 cubes for each Tetris Block.

Helpful videos

To make the origami Tetris blocks you’ll need to fold a 5×5 grid on every sheet of paper that you’ll use. In the tutorial I show the “origami way” to do that, without a ruler or any kind of tool. But the videos below can help you in this task:

Use parallel lines (like in a page of a notebook) to divide the paper into equal parts
Use the first grid to divide the other sheets of paper easily

More origami from cubes

There are many ways to connect the cubes and make different models, such as the Rubik’s Cube, the SOMA Cube Puzzle and the Moving Cubes. See my playlist on YouTube with all my cube based origami.