Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

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 :)

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

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_%28board_game%29 would be cool

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 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'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/

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.

Thanks for the suggestions! Guest accounts are definitely a necessity. I had been looking at some asymmetrical games like Adugo and Viking Chess, myself.

Thanks! Will try to figure out a version that I can get permission to add to the website.

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 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

As a lay boardgamer, what makes a board game abstract?

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.

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'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.

You're welcome to "Capture Pentominoes" if you want it!

https://club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/free-software/pento/pento.html

Perfect, thank you!

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").

Check out Quoridor

Yeah, that's another nice one. I've got a Quoridor set myself.