Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

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.

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 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.

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'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.

Check out Quoridor

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

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)?

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

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.

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.

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/

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/

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.

Looks interesting. What engine/framework did you use to make the game?