If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
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.
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.
Offense can move any piece by one dot, following the lines, and cannot jump. Defense can move or jumping the pieces from the offense, in any direction, following the lines.
Jumping is obligatory, consecutive jumps are allowed (and also obligatory, e.g. you can't not take a double jump).
Game ends when:
1. The offense occupies all 9 squares of the fortress (offense wins)
2. There is no legal move for a player on their turn (that player loses)
3. The offense has fewer than 9 pieces left (defense wins)
For practiced players #1 is the most common end to a game and the offense gets a number of points equal to the remaining pieces; players then switch sides and the player with the most points wins.
That looks exactly like the game I'm thinking of, but it was not named that. What I played was in one of those books that came with checkers and had different board-game printed on each page, and I'm guessing "Asalto" is trademarked or something.
> I'm always looking for new games or new features to add
Nice feature to add would be single device multiplayer for the games.
I play board games mostly in person. I know that there are travel versions of many games... but I don't like to carry too much stuff. So I've created 2 games that I sometimes play with other people (e.g. on a train, bus, or anywhere else if there's nothing better to do).
Both games have only 2 player mode on single device. They're PWAs with offline support, so you can install them on your phone and don't need internet to play.
These are:
- backgammon: https://nenadalm.github.io/backgammon/ (link to the rules at the bottom in menu)
- virus wars: https://nenadalm.github.io/virus-wars/ (link to the rules at the bottom)
Someone else recently mentioned to me that Virus Wars is their favorite game! I'm glad to see it getting some love.
This year we picked up Homeworlds, there are more rules, but scratches a deeper itch. Plus you feel like a space general while playing lol.
This sounded very intriguing - what are the chances of two people inventing the same abstract strategy game!? At the least there might be some interesting story about how they arrived at same idea.
Wikipedia phrases it differently though:
> Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and later rediscovered and popularized by John Nash.
Ok less amazing
https://mancala.fandom.com/wiki/Hus
It is fun how it is deterministic in theory, but it is hard to predict more than a few moves ahead - so seems random in practice. Also that you can go from being way ahead to losing, very quickly. I implemented a game engine for it. Can discuss if you are interested.
How does one become skilled in something like that?
Feature requests:
- TwixT - just TwixT PP like on LittleGolem is fine (much easier to implement).
- Quoridor - a delightfully incomprehensible game.
- Larger board sizes. Hex starts being really fun at 19x19!
Questions and suggestions:
- On reddit you mention you "used AlphaZero-style methods to train the bots" - I suppose the networks are size-dependent? You could look into the many KataGo improvements[0].
- You mention the source code isn't released. If you released it, people could help add games.
Again, very well done, thank you!
[0]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo#training-history-and-r...
Dieter Stein's games are also supposed to be wonderful abstracts (Urbino, Fendo, Tintas) though I haven't had a chance to play those yet.
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions!
Yes, the networks are size dependent right now. It's a great idea to copy-paste and then adapt the KataGo network architecture since it isn't size dependent and has been proven to reach superhuman strengths.
A couple more questions/remarks:
- It seems everything is happening on the client? My CPU (I'm on a laptop without a real GPU) goes wild during analysis. But also I don't notice any big bag of neural-net-weights being downloaded. Mind sharing how it works?
- Care to share more about the networks? How long did you train the networks for and on what GPU? Circa how many params? Any and all details you'd like to share :)
- This Tumbleweed game is fun! This game seems somewhat inspired by both Hex and Go, and the author lives in Warsaw. Interestingly, I lived in Warsaw in 2020, am very active in the Go scene (4 dan), and at least know the names of the people who play Hex, and yet somehow never heard about Michał or Tumbleweed before...
I spent a lot of time collecting and breaking down game elements from all board games I could find, but as things go with ADD I then ran out of steam before I had any kind of functional prototype.
As always I highly recommend The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, and although its not his best book I really enjoyed the game aspects in it.
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.
You should try to add the Gipf games at some point, they are very wonderful!
It clearly is stuck in the Java Applet era where it started but Dave eventually made an Android port and modern Java has no issues running it!
Also, in case you are curious, Tumbleweed has a discord https://discord.com/invite/wu6Xdtt497
They are currently playing through the 2025 Tumbleweed World Championship. Lots of strong players there!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dnane might be a fit.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
Most games are quite modern, including some designed this year. And they have Homeworlds!
Or Spirit Island at high difficulty?
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.
Ah, I miss the old Isotropic implementation....
Master of Orion?
Here's a wealth of turn-based strategy out there, especially in the retro days.
'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.
There are also games with themes that don’t really help make sense of the rules — the theme is just pasted on. These are still considered abstract, despite technically having a theme.
The “ameritrash” genre are known for having strong themes that tie to the rules of the game. E.g. a lot of co-op games with plastic figures.
Old school euro games often have a pasted on theme, and are more abstract.
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").
i've always been curious about the gameplay, but have absolutely no interest in reading past words like "wizard", "mage", or "eldritch", and i won't look at anything where i have to see or imagine that somebody is wearing a cape, or even play with gamers who are willing to imagine they are wearing capes in other games.
If it's still down for you, I'm happy to debug further, you can reach me at my Discord https://discord.gg/cSmaVrJMYy
