The Duke — The Duke is kind of like chess on steroids with a velvet bag. Each time you move a tile, you must also flip it, so you have to really start thinking 5 turns ahead.
You also only start with 3 tiles on the board, and for the rest of the game may either use your turn to move a tile or draw a new one from your bag to place. A big advantage is memorizing the moves that the pieces make on both sides of the tiles, and the more you play, the better you know them.
To get 4 in a row, the pieces only need to share one characteristic between them. Easy set up and easy clean up. Sagrada - This is a addition to this list that I absolutely had to include. Sagrada is a beautiful and puzzly dice-drafting game about making colorful stained glass windows, inspired by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona.
It feels good, looks good, and plays well. They are a pleasure to play with. Not to be missed. Spielstein — The site of Deiter Stein, a German designer who concocts elegant abstract games and then gets them published in classy editions.
I love these guys. However, they seem to have stopped making new posts a couple of years ago. Mark Steere Games — I hesitate to put this here because, in addition to being a well-known game designer, Mark is a notorious internet troll. Combinatorial Game Theory — This blog is maintained by a professor in combinatorial game theory.
There are hundreds of books dedicated to single games, like Chess for example. It only includes books about abstract games in general or those covering many games. Warning: the last 5 books on this list require significant mathematical knowledge. Email Address. View all posts by Nick Bentley. This is a topic that is near to my heart… Take care! Where are your contact details though? Great list of online games! Thanks for the great article on abstract board game resources on the web.
May we kindly contribute to this essay and request an update? We tend to think that our skillgamesboard. See Blokus. Great compendium. Not all abstract games, but many such games; live and turn-based, and large, active player community. Good point about BGA. These thing interfere with the core pleasures of this sort of game for the people who love them. A great list, Nick. My suggestion is instead to include a link to the rules to Oware aka Awari or Warri which is much, much older and, at a global level, is much more widely played than Kalah.
Craig — yes! Early in the new year, hopefully. Thank you for thinking of me. I recommend you share it in one or more of the forums I list in the article above. Nice article! Have you tried Hex Oust and Polar?
Thank you for this resource! So many wonderful games — some I own or have at least played and many that are new to discover. On another note I was happy to see you depict the beautiful Mancala board I happen to own. Great paper. You mention chess and shogi. Maybe xiangqi was worth to mention too. Nice work anyhow. Thank you. I considered it, but I felt that was one too many versions of Chess.
Hello all, I hope the following is of interest to those who like Hex and related games. I wrote Mathematica code for a game which is a version of Hex played on a sphere, which is in some sense a generalization of Hex. Brief description from there: The game Tri is played on a sphere with a centrally symmetric triangulation where every vertex and every edge of the triangulation is initially uncolored.
To move, a player black or white clicks an uncolored vertex to color it and its antipode. Only pairs of antipodes on the equator show as two different points. If the endpoints of an edge have the same color, the edge inherits that color. A player wins when a path of their color connects an antipodal pair of vertices. Apologies for delay. Have you played the Trxilt? It is also an abstract strategy game. The Trxilt rules that you get with the game when the game is downloaded from the App-Store Apple, are very short with the game having no theme.
In this version of the game each player gets 30 turns. When playing this version of Trxilt, each player gets only 16 turns. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Skip to content. Contents What are they? Which are the best? It does take a bit to get used to, but once you do it becomes endlessly fun! I love this game.
It is so simple yet so fun — and it can be played with up to 4 players which is rare for an abstract strategy game! The objective of Quoridor is simple. Get your pawn from your side of the board to your opponents side that is sitting directly opposite from you. The fun of the game is planning ahead and coming up with a strategy. Many times, I have found that I have unintentionally built a prison for myself… or had a trap for my opponent backfire. It is undisputedly one of the best known and popular abstract strategy board games of all time.
The game has been played for centuries and is one of the first abstract games I learned to play with my father. Each of these six pieces move differently. If you would like to learn more about how to play chess then click here. GO is considered by many people to be one of the most challenging and deep classic abstract games.
It is also one of the oldest board games and the second most played board game in the world source. The game feels like a full-on war in which there are different battles fought all over the board. There is a lot for players to pay attention to. GO is a game for players who are familiar with abstract games and the complexities and strategic thinking that comes with them.
A new player to abstract strategic board games will likely feel overwhelmed and disorientated playing GO! But if you love a challenge then get stuck in! Each player gets a set of stones in the game generally black for one player and white for the other. Stones are placed on the intersections of lines on the grid. Players alternate placing stones down on the grid — trying to control as much of a board area as they can.
These stones are removed from the board and kept until the end of the game and scored against you. At the end of the game the player with the highest score wins. Score is determined by the total territory a player has surrounded less the stones captured by the opponent. Another game I included in my best date night board game article.
The game can be very deep and require a lot of strategy, but is also easy to pick up for beginner gamers. The aim of the game is to surround your opponents queen tile piece without them doing the same to you. Tiles that surround the queen can be made up of a mix of your tiles and your opponents. Select a player to start — that player places one of their tiles on the table. The next player then places on of their tiles on one of the adjoining edges of the first players tile.
Games of hive are always fun and the board is always different! The movement of the different bugs tiles makes strategy in the game hugely important. Blocking key insects or pulling off a blind side move is always a great feeling. There have been many great games since, but this historic gem is still worth a play.
This is an abstract game of resource management and tactical pawn movement. You need to build up castles and position your knights to score the most points each turn.
You have limited resources to work with. Torres won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award for its release. For 2 — 4 players, games run about 1 hour each. Battle Sheep makes the list of the best abstract strategy board games because it is a ton of game in a very quick amount of time. After a board is formed of pasture tiles, players put their stack of angry sheep tokens on a remote space of the outskirts of the board.
Their goal is to move across as many of the pastures spaces as possible before your opponents can do the same. The key to winning one of these quick showdowns is to pin your fellow players in so their sheep are stuck and cannot move. For 2 — 4 players, games run about 15 minutes. As the sun turns, you need to plant and nourish trees on a quest to get as much light as possible. For 2 — 4 players, games run about 30 — 60 minutes.
Tiny Towns makes the list of the best abstract strategy board games because it is an ingenious game that blends resource management and civ building with Tetris like puzzle solving. Fill up the correct configurations and combo up to get big points. For 1 — 6 players, games run about 45 — 60 minutes. This addition to the list of the best abstract strategy board games is probably one of the simplest titles here.
In Hive, you have different insect tiles to place on the table.
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