[Paracompact]

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.

[BrenBarn]

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.

[Paracompact]

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.

[BrenBarn]

It's interesting to try to find those diamonds in the rough, the games that could be the next chess or go if only people spent the time to plumb their depths.

[johnecheck]

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

[barbs]

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

[johnecheck]

Dart/Flutter, custom engine. I've been very satisfied with it; does everything I need for a 2d game. Once it can natively use shaders/GPU on web it'll be perfect.

[kkukshtel]

The space is being actively developed but it also requires you know where to look.

This is a journal that tracks a lot of new abstract stuff: https://www.abstractgames.org/

Notable recent releases:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/352238/turncoats

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/272380/shobu

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/430875/high-tide

[mrichey-9988]

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/

[abstractbg]

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

[Paracompact]

> 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.

[ixwt]

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.

[bondarchuk]

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!

[baruchel]

May I suggest the Greenchess website? https://greenchess.net/ It certainly has some huge potential: nice minimalist interface and probably about 50 or 60 chess variants for all tastes. Some of them are obviously more or less "recent". You can easily start a new game or accept a pending invitation. I would call the set of players quite "active" and certainly motivated. But it is true that the pool of players remains small and you generally play against the same players again and again.

[abstractbg]

Very cool website! Also, check out 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel XD

[mylesp]

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/

[Buttons840]

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?

[Paracompact]

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.

[zem]

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.

[vintermann]

The Gipf games have had some two decades now, and quite competitive online scenes for some of the games. They've been played enough to know they aren't broken or trivially human-solvable (Zèrtz on the smallest board option probably is but like most of the Gipf games, it's very naturally extendable to a larger board.) Dvonn and Gipf had strong bots for them even in the pre-MCTS age, but that's not really a problem. None of the Gipf games are drawish.

Whether they become "timeless classics" and get a stream of discoveries or not I think is mostly down to chance. It's more about what we let them be in our lives than their inherent qualities.

[Buttons840]

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)?

[Paracompact]

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.

[vintermann]

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.

[dole]

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/

[zahlman]

> competitive Dominion

Ah, I miss the old Isotropic implementation....

[cgreerrun]

Check out Quoridor

[abstractbg]

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

[AtlasBarfed]

Civilization?

Master of Orion?

Here's a wealth of turn-based strategy out there, especially in the retro days.

[hermitcrab]

I loved the first versions of Civilization and Masters of Orion. I tried one of the more recent version of Civilization and didn't like it anything like as much. But I am a lot older - so it could just be me. How do more recent versions of Masters of Orion hold up?

[AtlasBarfed]

Moo2 is good. Moo1 avoided a lot of the city micromanagement that civilization had. Moo2 is a hybrid of moo1 in civilization.

Moo3 I never played, mostly based on the recommendations and reviews of other moo players.

I played civilization through civilization 3, and I muck around a lot with free civ, which is kind of hackable.

There's also remnants of the precursors, a Java remake of mu1 that I found very hackable. I've been able to run it from IntelliJ and hacked the source code.

[hermitcrab]

Thanks!