Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go.
If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
The name of my favorite abstract strategy game escapes me, but it is played on a solitaire[1] shaped board, with lines connecting the dots indicating valid moves (all lateral moves are allowed, diagonal are somewhat restricted; I can draw the board from memory). It starts with the offense occupying every spot except for the nine that make up one limb of the cross (the "fortress"). Defense has two pieces only, placed anywhere inside the fortress.
Offense can move any piece by one dot, following the lines, and cannot jump. Defense can move or jumping the pieces from the offense, in any direction, following the lines.
Jumping is obligatory, consecutive jumps are allowed (and also obligatory, e.g. you can't not take a double jump).
Game ends when:
1. The offense occupies all 9 squares of the fortress (offense wins)
2. There is no legal move for a player on their turn (that player loses)
3. The offense has fewer than 9 pieces left (defense wins)
For practiced players #1 is the most common end to a game and the offense gets a number of points equal to the remaining pieces; players then switch sides and the player with the most points wins.
I'm personally a big fan of asymmetrical games. A game I've wanted to play but have never had the board to play it on is Unlur [0]. Arimaa [1] is another one with some history behind it that is uncommon.
It is very much appreciated that I don't have to make an account to play. That is one of the most annoying thing on sites like these to play games.
I also really like asymmetrical games. In particular the various Tafl[0] reconstructions. Some are unbalanced, but some are very balanced and fun to play as either attacker or defender. There are various versions with rule variations to accommodate various board sizes too.
I have not played Unlur. Looks like a cool hex variant. I like the initial phase where who plays white is decided. It is a neat way of working that out.
Thanks for the suggestions! Guest accounts are definitely a necessity. I had been looking at some asymmetrical games like Adugo and Viking Chess, myself.
What do I think? It's amazing! Got crushed by a 300 bot in Hex, then beat a 100 bot, then again lost against 200. It's great how one can see the review immediately afterwards!
Feature requests:
- TwixT - just TwixT PP like on LittleGolem is fine (much easier to implement).
- Quoridor - a delightfully incomprehensible game.
- Larger board sizes. Hex starts being really fun at 19x19!
Questions and suggestions:
- On reddit you mention you "used AlphaZero-style methods to train the bots" - I suppose the networks are size-dependent? You could look into the many KataGo improvements[0].
- You mention the source code isn't released. If you released it, people could help add games.
I love games and once back in the day had the idea of using some form of genetic algorithm to combine game elements to make new games (Today we'd probably replace the genetic part with some form of NN).
I spent a lot of time collecting and breaking down game elements from all board games I could find, but as things go with ADD I then ran out of steam before I had any kind of functional prototype.
As always I highly recommend The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, and although its not his best book I really enjoyed the game aspects in it.
nice website, Thanks for sharing. I like board games, so I'll definitely try some (or all) of them.
> I'm always looking for new games or new features to add
Nice feature to add would be single device multiplayer for the games.
I play board games mostly in person. I know that there are travel versions of many games... but I don't like to carry too much stuff. So I've created 2 games that I sometimes play with other people (e.g. on a train, bus, or anywhere else if there's nothing better to do).
Both games have only 2 player mode on single device. They're PWAs with offline support, so you can install them on your phone and don't need internet to play.
pentominoes would be a nice one to add (players take turns placing pentominoes on the board until someone cannot make a move). probably one of the variants like callisto or blokus where everyone has the same set of tiles in different colours and there are rules around connectedness
the usenet thread was a fun nostalgic read - something about the character of discussions was different from the ones you get on web based fora like reddit today. (also i recognise your name from rec.puzzles, which was another nice nostalgia moment :))
> Hex is a two-player abstract strategy game invented independently by Piet Hein in 1942 and John Nash in 1948.
This sounded very intriguing - what are the chances of two people inventing the same abstract strategy game!? At the least there might be some interesting story about how they arrived at same idea.
Wikipedia phrases it differently though:
> Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and later rediscovered and popularized by John Nash.
To me, when I think “abstract”, I think “no theme”. Games that aren’t abstract have a theme that helps make sense of the rules of the game.
There are also games with themes that don’t really help make sense of the rules — the theme is just pasted on. These are still considered abstract, despite technically having a theme.
The “ameritrash” genre are known for having strong themes that tie to the rules of the game. E.g. a lot of co-op games with plastic figures.
Old school euro games often have a pasted on theme, and are more abstract.
If you have to read things, roll things, or hide things, it's not an abstract.
(This fails to include backgammon and Parcheesi when maybe it should, and includes Zark City when somehow I feel it shouldn't, but it's not a bad starting point.)
Additionally: No dexterity (which is kind of a special case of "no chance").
The most important subjective criterion, IMO, and the one from which all other objective criteria are just approximations, is that the game be as rules simple and as strategically deep as possible. If there are any superficial criteria, it's that the theming be "austere" (which is what makes Zark City stand out slightly).
is there a game that is an abstract version of D&D?
i've always been curious about the gameplay, but have absolutely no interest in reading past words like "wizard", "mage", or "eldritch", and i won't look at anything where i have to see or imagine that somebody is wearing a cape, or even play with gamers who are willing to imagine they are wearing capes in other games.
I am also past the age of wanting to believe in magic. And also past the age of having time for long plays. Most of my friends are busy doing serious adult stuff.
So outside of baroque dnd-like systems, my personal favourite right now is a subgenre called journalling solo RPG, which are often minimalist, but covering all kinds of themes and topics.
Why do you have such an aversion to capes? There's no rule saying you have to play as a character in a cape.
If you're asking if there's a version of D&D that's pure math and no roleplay, the closest thing I can imagine would be Dragon Dice, or something with the mechanics of a very basic roguelike. The math in D&D itself such as in combat is affected by your character's stats and the encounters created by the DM, so the mechanics and the role playing are kind of tied together.
The thing is that dragons and magic and Harry Potter all become irrelevant at some point in life. Power fantasies do have an expiration date.
Now, the genre itself, all the storytelling involved, can easily be adapted to more serious, or even abstract, thinking.
In fact, it was, and there are plenty of alternative rpg universes. But, similar to how serious non-marvel movies are a niche, serious rpgs are also less popular.
Chess is an abstract proxy for a wargame, but is not in itself a wargame.
'Abstract' is somewhere on the chess side of the spectrum between Go and moving miniature battle tanks around and flipping to page 237 of Appendix E to look up how much water the average Italian soldier needed to boil his pasta in the Tobruk campaign.
As a longtime chess and go player, I was just doing some research the other day into what modern abstracts are out there. I was disappointed by how dry I came up.
Even if you expand the search criteria to include video games, there just aren't many deeply strategic discrete-time games that weren't invented centuries ago and have players online at any given time. Here I exclude games that are perpetually changing and/or have strategies locked behind progression systems and paywalls, such as TCGs and virtual deck builders. The very few exceptions I found were niche Discord communities around games like Tak, Hex, or Advanced Wars.
When did we as a society lose the appreciation for these things? I get why including a component of dexterity in strategic video games (e.g. RTS) is to take full advantage of the medium, but all this in conjunction means we are very likely never to see another deeply studied cerebral game like go, chess, shogi, mahjong, etc. arise ever again.
This seems like the time to mention my unreleased board/video game, Star Gambit!
It's a turn-based abstract space fleet battle coming to your browser in 2026. It's already playable over the internet w/ time controls and ratings. If that interests you, join the discord for updates and playtest invites!
I think "have players online at any given time" is the tough part there, but it's also the tough part for many non-abstract games. If you look around on Board Game Arena you can see a number of abstract games available, but with many you'll struggle to find any other players.
There are some cool abstract games out there, but they're not super popular. Abalone was mentioned in another comment here. Octi is another cool one. Some like Azul or Patchwork have a light theme but it doesn't really affect the rules, mostly just an excuse for the piece design, which I think puts them in a similar category to chess.
I'm not sure I'd say we won't get another deeply studied game. I mean, if we're comparing to chess and go, it will take hundreds of years to really know if any modern game has that staying power, let alone remains interesting to analyze. But I do wonder if we'll ever get a game that's both deep and popular.
The popularity of RPGs, TCGs, and expansion-based games suggests to me that a lot of people really like feeling a sense of immersion into a "world" that's constantly revealing new "content", rather than discovering new variety within an existing system. Maybe this is just a stereotype, but I also feel like there's a synergy this and a similar vibe prominent in stuff like fanfic, where people like to engage in this sort of generative building on some core ideas. The "pure" or "cerebral" gamer who is really interested in the ramifications of a fixed ruleset is somewhat more rare. Also there are so many games out there now that even cerebral gamers may be tempted to explore new ones rather than digging deep into familiar ones.
This is just to say that maybe some existing abstract games are actually deep, but in order to know that, we'd need people to take the time to analyze them and explore them. Maybe time will tell.
Yeah, Azul stands out as a great exception to my rant. I get similar feelings playing it as I do playing riichi mahjong (a fabulously deep emergent blend of luck, planning, and player psychology). It's also managed a decent popularity not just as a quasi-abstract but as a board game, period.
There is another aspect to the thing I didn't mention but you did: It may be that the sheer amount of interest in board and video games at large is more to blame for the lack of deep abstracts than is the inherent lack of appreciation for them. In sum total, there are probably games out there currently that could be mechanically fit as a successor to chess or go, but with so many competing games out there (both cerebral and otherwise), even the cerebral gamer is unlikely to pursue them singlemindedly.
I'm very hopeful that the problem is simply lack of general awareness of these games, and that once there's enough content surrounding them, we'll have a healthy population of people playing more abstract strategy games.
Fun story regarding Hex. It nearly reached what I would call a "mainstream" audience with the movie "A Beautiful Mind" about John Nash starring Russel Crowe. Unfortunately, the Hex scene was cut from the movie! You can watch the cut scene at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTZ3nn2Bge4
> I'm very hopeful that the problem is simply lack of general awareness of these games, and that once there's enough content surrounding them, we'll have a healthy population of people playing more abstract strategy games.
Possibly, but my takeaway from COVID is that games like chess and go (which experienced a bump in popularity during the lockdowns, and have since been dwindling back down) are not merely gems waiting to be rediscovered, but instead appeal to outdated tastes in gaming, and are unlikely to be replicated given market realities. You need approachability for game-one beginners, you need vivid and eye-catching visuals, you need progression systems and content drips to keep players hooked, you need monetization to milk the whales, etc.
I'm not an expert by any means, but there isn't much to draw people to other games aside from curiosity. When it comes to Chess and Go, there is significant money on the line. Chess was also a proxy fight during the Cold War.
The facebook group "abstract nation" has made having a facebook account worth all the bad stuff associated with facebook. Its lead me to find a ton of great abstracts. It also pointed me to this: https://play.abstractplay.com/
What about something like competitive Dominion? There are expansions, but the game is symmetrical. All players have the same abilities in an actual game.
I love Spirit Island! Probably played more hours of that game than any other in my collection. Granted, it's purely a cooperative game, and much more artificially complex ("fiddly") than any abstract. It's the immortal simplicity and competition of games like chess and go that I was looking to rekindle, but I guess they aren't well suited to modern gaming tastes.
Dominion is also great, and in its simplicity literally invented the deck building genre. But it, too, is too artificially complex to become immortal, even before you get into its 16+ expansions. The proliferation of the deck builder genre also makes it less likely any individual game is going to be deeply studied.
Credit to games like YINSH, anyway, that specifically try to appeal to competitive, deep, and mathematically simple foundations. They just don't have what it takes to thrive in the age of monetized bright flashing lights.
I also think the gipf games haven't had enough time and volume of players to see if they are actually as long-term engaging as chess and go. my speculation is that the classic abstracts are the ones that turned out to have an almost accidental emergent depth that kept people playing them even as better and better strategies were devised, because they were never "solved". it is unclear if yinsh will turn out to have an endless stream of better and better strategies emerge, or if it will be fun while people figure it out but plateau when they do.
Dominion is licensed in various online incarnations anyway.
With limits on expansions and other rules, it is possible to get Dominion competitive enough to study games and optimize for turns, the original isotropic had a decent ranking and rating system (RIP and add’l shoutout for their implementation of the Innovation card game):
I haven't played YINSH, but I haven played some of the other games in that "series". You're aware of the others, right? Which is your favorite (YINSH I assume)?
Only played YINSH, and only a few games. It's nice and I would be eager to play more, but unsure if I would study it deeply myself even if it did become popular. A lot of abstracts tend to blend together in my head as "combinatorial slugfests," where the player with the most RAM in their brain wins out. (YINSH may or may not be like that, don't take my word for it.) It's the primary reason I switched from chess to go, where my propensity to make tactical blunders can at least be offset by larger scale planning and good directional judgement.
Not the OP, but I liked ZERTZ. It's very symmetric, almost, but not quite, an "impartial game" in mathematical terms (where you don't have to know whose move it is to know if they have a winning position). You can set up the most outrageous combinations, going from nothing to having won with a series of forced moves.
Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go.
If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
The name of my favorite abstract strategy game escapes me, but it is played on a solitaire[1] shaped board, with lines connecting the dots indicating valid moves (all lateral moves are allowed, diagonal are somewhat restricted; I can draw the board from memory). It starts with the offense occupying every spot except for the nine that make up one limb of the cross (the "fortress"). Defense has two pieces only, placed anywhere inside the fortress.
Offense can move any piece by one dot, following the lines, and cannot jump. Defense can move or jumping the pieces from the offense, in any direction, following the lines.
Jumping is obligatory, consecutive jumps are allowed (and also obligatory, e.g. you can't not take a double jump).
Game ends when:
1. The offense occupies all 9 squares of the fortress (offense wins)
2. There is no legal move for a player on their turn (that player loses)
3. The offense has fewer than 9 pieces left (defense wins)
For practiced players #1 is the most common end to a game and the offense gets a number of points equal to the remaining pieces; players then switch sides and the player with the most points wins.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_solitaire
Asalto? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asalto
I'm personally a big fan of asymmetrical games. A game I've wanted to play but have never had the board to play it on is Unlur [0]. Arimaa [1] is another one with some history behind it that is uncommon.
It is very much appreciated that I don't have to make an account to play. That is one of the most annoying thing on sites like these to play games.
[0]: https://www.iggamecenter.com/en/rules/unlur
[1]: https://www.iggamecenter.com/en/rules/arimaa
I also really like asymmetrical games. In particular the various Tafl[0] reconstructions. Some are unbalanced, but some are very balanced and fun to play as either attacker or defender. There are various versions with rule variations to accommodate various board sizes too.
I have not played Unlur. Looks like a cool hex variant. I like the initial phase where who plays white is decided. It is a neat way of working that out.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
Thanks for the suggestions! Guest accounts are definitely a necessity. I had been looking at some asymmetrical games like Adugo and Viking Chess, myself.
What do I think? It's amazing! Got crushed by a 300 bot in Hex, then beat a 100 bot, then again lost against 200. It's great how one can see the review immediately afterwards!
Feature requests:
- TwixT - just TwixT PP like on LittleGolem is fine (much easier to implement).
- Quoridor - a delightfully incomprehensible game.
- Larger board sizes. Hex starts being really fun at 19x19!
Questions and suggestions:
- On reddit you mention you "used AlphaZero-style methods to train the bots" - I suppose the networks are size-dependent? You could look into the many KataGo improvements[0].
- You mention the source code isn't released. If you released it, people could help add games.
Again, very well done, thank you!
[0]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo#training-history-and-r...
I love games and once back in the day had the idea of using some form of genetic algorithm to combine game elements to make new games (Today we'd probably replace the genetic part with some form of NN).
I spent a lot of time collecting and breaking down game elements from all board games I could find, but as things go with ADD I then ran out of steam before I had any kind of functional prototype.
As always I highly recommend The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, and although its not his best book I really enjoyed the game aspects in it.
Are you familiar with The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse?
nice website, Thanks for sharing. I like board games, so I'll definitely try some (or all) of them.
> I'm always looking for new games or new features to add
Nice feature to add would be single device multiplayer for the games.
I play board games mostly in person. I know that there are travel versions of many games... but I don't like to carry too much stuff. So I've created 2 games that I sometimes play with other people (e.g. on a train, bus, or anywhere else if there's nothing better to do).
Both games have only 2 player mode on single device. They're PWAs with offline support, so you can install them on your phone and don't need internet to play.
These are:
- backgammon: https://nenadalm.github.io/backgammon/ (link to the rules at the bottom in menu)
- virus wars: https://nenadalm.github.io/virus-wars/ (link to the rules at the bottom)
Thanks, single device multiplayer is a great idea.
Someone else recently mentioned to me that Virus Wars is their favorite game! I'm glad to see it getting some love.
How about 2 players playing on the same device, i.e. offline play?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dnane might be a fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_%28board_game%29 would be cool
Thanks!
I haven't added a commercial game before, but I will reach out to the owners of the game and see what I can do.
pentominoes would be a nice one to add (players take turns placing pentominoes on the board until someone cannot make a move). probably one of the variants like callisto or blokus where everyone has the same set of tiles in different colours and there are rules around connectedness
Thanks! Will try to figure out a version that I can get permission to add to the website.
You're welcome to "Capture Pentominoes" if you want it!
https://club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/free-software/pento/pento.html
the usenet thread was a fun nostalgic read - something about the character of discussions was different from the ones you get on web based fora like reddit today. (also i recognise your name from rec.puzzles, which was another nice nostalgia moment :))
Perfect, thank you!
> Hex is a two-player abstract strategy game invented independently by Piet Hein in 1942 and John Nash in 1948.
This sounded very intriguing - what are the chances of two people inventing the same abstract strategy game!? At the least there might be some interesting story about how they arrived at same idea.
Wikipedia phrases it differently though:
> Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and later rediscovered and popularized by John Nash.
Ok less amazing
Hive is my favourite for anyone looking for another abstract strategy boardgame. It has been very fun and feels very deep.
Hive is a really nice game.
This year we picked up Homeworlds, there are more rules, but scratches a deeper itch. Plus you feel like a space general while playing lol.
https://youtu.be/Nz16s6oCIlQ?si=lzSYIZZG4LtSLZUf
I don’t quite understand this tumbleweed game but it seems fun so I’ll look up a video.
Here's the rules video used by the Tumbleweed community https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjA_g3nwYW4
Also, in case you are curious, Tumbleweed has a discord https://discord.com/invite/wu6Xdtt497
They are currently playing through the 2025 Tumbleweed World Championship. Lots of strong players there!
As a lay boardgamer, what makes a board game abstract?
To me, when I think “abstract”, I think “no theme”. Games that aren’t abstract have a theme that helps make sense of the rules of the game.
There are also games with themes that don’t really help make sense of the rules — the theme is just pasted on. These are still considered abstract, despite technically having a theme.
The “ameritrash” genre are known for having strong themes that tie to the rules of the game. E.g. a lot of co-op games with plastic figures.
Old school euro games often have a pasted on theme, and are more abstract.
No text, no chance, perfect information.
If you have to read things, roll things, or hide things, it's not an abstract.
(This fails to include backgammon and Parcheesi when maybe it should, and includes Zark City when somehow I feel it shouldn't, but it's not a bad starting point.)
Additionally: No dexterity (which is kind of a special case of "no chance").
The most important subjective criterion, IMO, and the one from which all other objective criteria are just approximations, is that the game be as rules simple and as strategically deep as possible. If there are any superficial criteria, it's that the theming be "austere" (which is what makes Zark City stand out slightly).
is there a game that is an abstract version of D&D?
i've always been curious about the gameplay, but have absolutely no interest in reading past words like "wizard", "mage", or "eldritch", and i won't look at anything where i have to see or imagine that somebody is wearing a cape, or even play with gamers who are willing to imagine they are wearing capes in other games.
There are literally 1000s of non-DnD RPGS!
I am also past the age of wanting to believe in magic. And also past the age of having time for long plays. Most of my friends are busy doing serious adult stuff.
So outside of baroque dnd-like systems, my personal favourite right now is a subgenre called journalling solo RPG, which are often minimalist, but covering all kinds of themes and topics.
Why do you have such an aversion to capes? There's no rule saying you have to play as a character in a cape.
If you're asking if there's a version of D&D that's pure math and no roleplay, the closest thing I can imagine would be Dragon Dice, or something with the mechanics of a very basic roguelike. The math in D&D itself such as in combat is affected by your character's stats and the encounters created by the DM, so the mechanics and the role playing are kind of tied together.
The thing is that dragons and magic and Harry Potter all become irrelevant at some point in life. Power fantasies do have an expiration date.
Now, the genre itself, all the storytelling involved, can easily be adapted to more serious, or even abstract, thinking.
In fact, it was, and there are plenty of alternative rpg universes. But, similar to how serious non-marvel movies are a niche, serious rpgs are also less popular.
Chess is an abstract proxy for a wargame, but is not in itself a wargame.
'Abstract' is somewhere on the chess side of the spectrum between Go and moving miniature battle tanks around and flipping to page 237 of Appendix E to look up how much water the average Italian soldier needed to boil his pasta in the Tobruk campaign.
As a longtime chess and go player, I was just doing some research the other day into what modern abstracts are out there. I was disappointed by how dry I came up.
Even if you expand the search criteria to include video games, there just aren't many deeply strategic discrete-time games that weren't invented centuries ago and have players online at any given time. Here I exclude games that are perpetually changing and/or have strategies locked behind progression systems and paywalls, such as TCGs and virtual deck builders. The very few exceptions I found were niche Discord communities around games like Tak, Hex, or Advanced Wars.
When did we as a society lose the appreciation for these things? I get why including a component of dexterity in strategic video games (e.g. RTS) is to take full advantage of the medium, but all this in conjunction means we are very likely never to see another deeply studied cerebral game like go, chess, shogi, mahjong, etc. arise ever again.
It's only correspondence play, but this site has 209 games at the moment and a reasonably active player base https://play.abstractplay.com/games
Most games are quite modern, including some designed this year. And they have Homeworlds!
This seems like the time to mention my unreleased board/video game, Star Gambit!
It's a turn-based abstract space fleet battle coming to your browser in 2026. It's already playable over the internet w/ time controls and ratings. If that interests you, join the discord for updates and playtest invites!
https://stargamb.it
https://discord.gg/f3MUSkJjFx
Looks interesting. What engine/framework did you use to make the game?
I think "have players online at any given time" is the tough part there, but it's also the tough part for many non-abstract games. If you look around on Board Game Arena you can see a number of abstract games available, but with many you'll struggle to find any other players.
There are some cool abstract games out there, but they're not super popular. Abalone was mentioned in another comment here. Octi is another cool one. Some like Azul or Patchwork have a light theme but it doesn't really affect the rules, mostly just an excuse for the piece design, which I think puts them in a similar category to chess.
I'm not sure I'd say we won't get another deeply studied game. I mean, if we're comparing to chess and go, it will take hundreds of years to really know if any modern game has that staying power, let alone remains interesting to analyze. But I do wonder if we'll ever get a game that's both deep and popular.
The popularity of RPGs, TCGs, and expansion-based games suggests to me that a lot of people really like feeling a sense of immersion into a "world" that's constantly revealing new "content", rather than discovering new variety within an existing system. Maybe this is just a stereotype, but I also feel like there's a synergy this and a similar vibe prominent in stuff like fanfic, where people like to engage in this sort of generative building on some core ideas. The "pure" or "cerebral" gamer who is really interested in the ramifications of a fixed ruleset is somewhat more rare. Also there are so many games out there now that even cerebral gamers may be tempted to explore new ones rather than digging deep into familiar ones.
This is just to say that maybe some existing abstract games are actually deep, but in order to know that, we'd need people to take the time to analyze them and explore them. Maybe time will tell.
Yeah, Azul stands out as a great exception to my rant. I get similar feelings playing it as I do playing riichi mahjong (a fabulously deep emergent blend of luck, planning, and player psychology). It's also managed a decent popularity not just as a quasi-abstract but as a board game, period.
There is another aspect to the thing I didn't mention but you did: It may be that the sheer amount of interest in board and video games at large is more to blame for the lack of deep abstracts than is the inherent lack of appreciation for them. In sum total, there are probably games out there currently that could be mechanically fit as a successor to chess or go, but with so many competing games out there (both cerebral and otherwise), even the cerebral gamer is unlikely to pursue them singlemindedly.
I'm very hopeful that the problem is simply lack of general awareness of these games, and that once there's enough content surrounding them, we'll have a healthy population of people playing more abstract strategy games.
Fun story regarding Hex. It nearly reached what I would call a "mainstream" audience with the movie "A Beautiful Mind" about John Nash starring Russel Crowe. Unfortunately, the Hex scene was cut from the movie! You can watch the cut scene at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTZ3nn2Bge4
> I'm very hopeful that the problem is simply lack of general awareness of these games, and that once there's enough content surrounding them, we'll have a healthy population of people playing more abstract strategy games.
Possibly, but my takeaway from COVID is that games like chess and go (which experienced a bump in popularity during the lockdowns, and have since been dwindling back down) are not merely gems waiting to be rediscovered, but instead appeal to outdated tastes in gaming, and are unlikely to be replicated given market realities. You need approachability for game-one beginners, you need vivid and eye-catching visuals, you need progression systems and content drips to keep players hooked, you need monetization to milk the whales, etc.
I'm not an expert by any means, but there isn't much to draw people to other games aside from curiosity. When it comes to Chess and Go, there is significant money on the line. Chess was also a proxy fight during the Cold War.
A fun and fairly popular one is Hive. It is a physical game akin to chess but has an active community online on https://hivegame.com/
The facebook group "abstract nation" has made having a facebook account worth all the bad stuff associated with facebook. Its lead me to find a ton of great abstracts. It also pointed me to this: https://play.abstractplay.com/
What about something like competitive Dominion? There are expansions, but the game is symmetrical. All players have the same abilities in an actual game.
Or Spirit Island at high difficulty?
I love Spirit Island! Probably played more hours of that game than any other in my collection. Granted, it's purely a cooperative game, and much more artificially complex ("fiddly") than any abstract. It's the immortal simplicity and competition of games like chess and go that I was looking to rekindle, but I guess they aren't well suited to modern gaming tastes.
Dominion is also great, and in its simplicity literally invented the deck building genre. But it, too, is too artificially complex to become immortal, even before you get into its 16+ expansions. The proliferation of the deck builder genre also makes it less likely any individual game is going to be deeply studied.
Credit to games like YINSH, anyway, that specifically try to appeal to competitive, deep, and mathematically simple foundations. They just don't have what it takes to thrive in the age of monetized bright flashing lights.
I also think the gipf games haven't had enough time and volume of players to see if they are actually as long-term engaging as chess and go. my speculation is that the classic abstracts are the ones that turned out to have an almost accidental emergent depth that kept people playing them even as better and better strategies were devised, because they were never "solved". it is unclear if yinsh will turn out to have an endless stream of better and better strategies emerge, or if it will be fun while people figure it out but plateau when they do.
Dominion is licensed in various online incarnations anyway.
With limits on expansions and other rules, it is possible to get Dominion competitive enough to study games and optimize for turns, the original isotropic had a decent ranking and rating system (RIP and add’l shoutout for their implementation of the Innovation card game):
https://dominion.isotropic.org/leaderboard/
I haven't played YINSH, but I haven played some of the other games in that "series". You're aware of the others, right? Which is your favorite (YINSH I assume)?
Only played YINSH, and only a few games. It's nice and I would be eager to play more, but unsure if I would study it deeply myself even if it did become popular. A lot of abstracts tend to blend together in my head as "combinatorial slugfests," where the player with the most RAM in their brain wins out. (YINSH may or may not be like that, don't take my word for it.) It's the primary reason I switched from chess to go, where my propensity to make tactical blunders can at least be offset by larger scale planning and good directional judgement.
Not the OP, but I liked ZERTZ. It's very symmetric, almost, but not quite, an "impartial game" in mathematical terms (where you don't have to know whose move it is to know if they have a winning position). You can set up the most outrageous combinations, going from nothing to having won with a series of forced moves.
Check out Quoridor
Yeah, that's another nice one. I've got a Quoridor set myself.