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Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

(abstractboardgames.com)
107 points abstractbg | 5 comments | 16 Oct 25 19:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.65s | source
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Paracompact ◴[23 Oct 25 00:39 UTC] No.45676908[source]▶
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.

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Buttons840 ◴[23 Oct 25 01:42 UTC] No.45677279[source]▶
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?

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1. Paracompact ◴[23 Oct 25 02:22 UTC] No.45677484[source]▶
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.

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2. Buttons840 ◴[23 Oct 25 04:17 UTC] No.45678126[source]▶
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)?
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3. vintermann ◴[23 Oct 25 04:36 UTC] No.45678200[source]▶
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.
4. dole ◴[23 Oct 25 04:59 UTC] No.45678290[source]▶
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/

5. zem ◴[23 Oct 25 05:32 UTC] No.45678456[source]▶
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.