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Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

180 points| abstractbg | 4 months ago |abstractboardgames.com

Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go.

If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)

87 comments

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ixwt|4 months ago

I'm personally a big fan of asymmetrical games. A game I've wanted to play but have never had the board to play it on is Unlur [0]. Arimaa [1] is another one with some history behind it that is uncommon.

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.

[0]: https://www.iggamecenter.com/en/rules/unlur

[1]: https://www.iggamecenter.com/en/rules/arimaa

sloum|4 months ago

I also really like asymmetrical games. In particular the various Tafl[0] reconstructions. Some are unbalanced, but some are very balanced and fun to play as either attacker or defender. There are various versions with rule variations to accommodate various board sizes too.

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games

abstractbg|4 months ago

Thanks for the suggestions! Guest accounts are definitely a necessity. I had been looking at some asymmetrical games like Adugo and Viking Chess, myself.

aidenn0|4 months ago

The name of my favorite abstract strategy game escapes me, but it is played on a solitaire[1] shaped board, with lines connecting the dots indicating valid moves (all lateral moves are allowed, diagonal are somewhat restricted; I can draw the board from memory). It starts with the offense occupying every spot except for the nine that make up one limb of the cross (the "fortress"). Defense has two pieces only, placed anywhere inside the fortress.

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.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_solitaire

nenadalm|4 months ago

nice website, Thanks for sharing. I like board games, so I'll definitely try some (or all) of them.

> 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)

abstractbg|4 months ago

Thanks, single device multiplayer is a great idea.

Someone else recently mentioned to me that Virus Wars is their favorite game! I'm glad to see it getting some love.

mylesp|4 months ago

Hive is my favourite for anyone looking for another abstract strategy boardgame. It has been very fun and feels very deep.

anentropic|4 months ago

> Hex is a two-player abstract strategy game invented independently by Piet Hein in 1942 and John Nash in 1948.

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

abstractbg|4 months ago

Sorry, thanks for pointing that out! Yes Nash rediscovered it. Will update once things calm down

hermitcrab|4 months ago

Have you come across the Mancala family of board games? I learned to play the Hus variation in Namibia:

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.

zahlman|4 months ago

> 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.

How does one become skilled in something like that?

tasuki|4 months ago

What do I think? It's amazing! Got crushed by a 300 bot in Hex, then beat a 100 bot, then again lost against 200. It's great how one can see the review immediately afterwards!

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...

almostdeadguy|4 months ago

I love TwixT, I discovered the Bookshelf Games version of this recently (a friend of mine's parents had an old copy at their beach house). Also a big fan of Alex Randolph's Ricochet Robots.

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.

abstractbg|4 months ago

Wow, beating a 100 bot is still impressive in my book.

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.

animal531|4 months ago

I love games and once back in the day had the idea of using some form of genetic algorithm to combine game elements to make new games (Today we'd probably replace the genetic part with some form of NN).

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.

Paracompact|4 months ago

Are you familiar with The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse?

kej|4 months ago

This reminds me of the game engine "Zillions of Games" from the '90s. It was a basic system for describing abstract strategy games and then an AI that could play them with you. They're still online but I don't know how active the community is: https://www.zillions-of-games.com/

robobro|4 months ago

Reminds me of boardspace, though the UI is much cleaner.

You should try to add the Gipf games at some point, they are very wonderful!

fhcbix|4 months ago

I was just going to recommend boardspace.net here! It also somewhat recently went open source: https://github.com/ddyer0/boardspace.net

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!

Paracompact|4 months ago

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|4 months ago

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.

johnecheck|4 months ago

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

mrichey-9988|4 months ago

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|4 months ago

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

bondarchuk|4 months ago

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|4 months ago

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.

mylesp|4 months ago

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|4 months ago

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?

cgreerrun|4 months ago

Check out Quoridor

AtlasBarfed|4 months ago

Civilization?

Master of Orion?

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

dgrin91|4 months ago

As a lay boardgamer, what makes a board game abstract?

vkou|4 months ago

Chess is an abstract proxy for a wargame, but is not in itself a wargame.

'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.

jader201|4 months ago

To me, when I think “abstract”, I think “no theme”. Games that aren’t abstract have a theme that helps make sense of the rules of the game.

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.

quuxplusone|4 months ago

No text, no chance, perfect information.

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").

robobro|4 months ago

Is your site down? I'm unable to load it now.

abstractbg|4 months ago

Apologizes! Are you able to load it now? The activity finally calmed down and I just pushed a new version a few hours ago. I'm not sure if that's related to what you experienced.

If it's still down for you, I'm happy to debug further, you can reach me at my Discord https://discord.gg/cSmaVrJMYy

zem|4 months ago

pentominoes would be a nice one to add (players take turns placing pentominoes on the board until someone cannot make a move). probably one of the variants like callisto or blokus where everyone has the same set of tiles in different colours and there are rules around connectedness

abstractbg|4 months ago

Thanks! Will try to figure out a version that I can get permission to add to the website.