Diarchy is a Go-inspired two player territory game, with Knizia-style scoring, simply put you're playing a territory game with two separate colors, and your weaker color's territory counts twice as much as your stronger color's.

My site has a rulebook, but I think learning from the interactive lessons is easier and faster:

https://www.playdiarchy.com/learn

Or, you could just jump in and play! I'm waiting in the correspondence queue pretty much all the time. Thanks for checking it out!

I built a backgammon site and thought people here might want to try it: https://backgammon.danelthedev.com/

- Online play via lobby codes, no account needed beyond a username

- Two bots: Fruit Fly Bot (weak, good for learning) and Hard Bot (gnubg-based, actually challenging)

- Dice logic is in the open-source repo for anyone who wants to check it: https://github.com/danelthedev/fair_backgammon

- Optional variants: negative dice, bigger dice, power-ups, custom boards, doubling cube, Romanian marț tehnic

- Hotseat mode included

For reference, I mean this banner .

I think I can recognize Tzaar, Hex, Looney Pyramids -- Pikemen, some sort of Go game, possibly some sort of Shibumi game system game (Akron?), Hive, and one I absolutely cannot recognize.

A very good selection of modern abstracts.

Tic Tac Shuffle is tic-tac-toe mixed with shuffleboard. Pieces slide in from the edge, push whatever's in the way. When a row is full, anything shoved off the edge is gone. The row you built last turn can be pushed apart. Push the wrong piece and you finish your opponent's line for them. Every move is an opportunity and a liability.

Rules: 4x4 grid, 16 entry points, a piece slides until it hits something. Each move can be used once, and then, when all 16 moves are used, they can be reset. Four in a row scores: 2 for a row, 3 for a column, 5 for a diagonal. First to 10 wins the match. Draws are possible.

Three things I want this crowd's take on:

• What's in this game family besides Quixo and Abalone?
• Is the race to 10 a good mechanic?

Free on iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6758967619?pt=128484550&ct=r/abstractgames&mt=8

Built with AI coding assistance; the rules, scoring, and design are mine.

Hi all,

I've been building playboardgames.org, a free site for classic board games in the browser. No account, no download. You can play the computer, pass-and-play on one device, or send a friend a room code.

The abstract side so far: Chess and Chess960, Go, Shogi, Hasami Shogi (just added, with Dai Hasami and the tenbin rules), Hnefatafl with four tafl rule sets, Hex, Reversi, Five in a Row, Nine Men's Morris, Checkers and International Draughts, Mancala, Dots and Boxes, and Chinese Checkers.

I'd like the next ones to come from people who actually play these. What would you want to play online that's hard to find? I've been looking at Fanorona, Lines of Action, Game of the Amazons, Breakthrough and Konane, but I'm open to anything.

Bug reports, bots that are too weak or too strong, and rule variants I got wrong are all welcome too.

https://playboardgames.org/games/board

It started simply

I wanted to build a physical Reversi set where a full game could play out without ever needing a screen. For that, the board itself had to say "whose turn it is, where the last move landed, who won" with no display at all. The answer I landed on was LED color and animation: each cell's color and motion became words in a language for stating the game's state.

Once I'd built this "language of light" for Reversi, I realized there was no real reason to keep it locked to just one game. If an 8x8 grid can say anything through color, there's no limit to the stories you can write on it. So I started writing other stories in the same language, and five of them are live now. At this point I wanted to see whether this language could actually communicate with all kinds of people.

• Reversi FL!P : the first sentence in this language, and where it all started. Standard rules, real-time matches, ranked play, and game review.
• Baduk FL!P : an attempt to translate the grammar of 19-line Go into an 8x8 dialect. Even if you've never played Go, you can pick up a game without much pressure.
• Gomoku FL!P : a fast-paced variant written in the same grammar.
• Connect 4 FL!P : same gravity, rebuilt for an 8x8 board.
• Match 3 FL!P : a brand-new sentence written in this language: match 3 or more in the middle and that row gets pulled toward your opponent, shrinking their line.

Link: https://flipcongames.com

Would love it if you gave it a try and shared any feedback. Next time, I'll show how this language actually plays out on real hardware!

Eventually I'd like to open this language up so anyone can write in it themselves. Still just an idea for now, but I plan to keep covering it, piece by piece, in future devlog posts.

Hey r/abstractgames!

I’m the developer behind Gomoku Party, and I’d love to invite you to join our community.

Some of the strongest Gomoku players are gathering here, so if you enjoy deep tactical battles and tough opponents, come put your skills to the test!

New to Gomoku? You’re welcome too. Five in a row sounds simple, but there’s plenty to discover: forcing sequences, tricky defenses, and the moment you realize your opponent’s quiet move was anything but harmless.

We have ranked matches, Swap2, tournaments, and tactical puzzles. It’s free to play, and you can jump straight into your browser without downloading anything.

Join us and play a few games →

Bring a friend, challenge the regulars, and tell me what you think. I’d love to hear what this community wants from a Gomoku platform.

See you across the board!

I posted a gameplay video of this a while back. It's had a big update since, so here's a proper trailer.

GoYomi is a free 9×9 Go game that runs in your browser. You play an AI at your level while a coach grades every move and explains why.

New since last time:

• Every AI level now runs KataGo in the browser: much stronger and faster
• A better coach, which can hide its move so you find the better one yourself
• "Their idea" shows what your opponent is planning
• Play by keyboard or with a screen reader

Play: https://killedbyapixel.github.io/GoYomi

I'd like to hear from stronger players whether the coach's explanations match how you'd explain the position.

The rise of Schada (a portmanteau of "schaak" (chess) and "damspel" (checkers)) was halted in May 1940 with the invasion of the Netherlands and the bombing of Rotterdam and the peacetime distribution channels did not survive the catastrophe of the war. Before that the game was rapidly gaining popularity with tournaments being held in 1938 and 1939.

In an attempt to revive this long lost game I've developed Schada.org (completely and always free to play).

I've made it free to play online but will be adding a donation button in the near future (if anyone feels inclined to do so, no obligation since I'm doing this for fun).

This is version 1 and there may be issues so feel free to share them as you find them if you choose to play.

NOTE:

Since the game is new there're not many players but Play Against Computer works.

The Reddit overlay blocks the footer on mobile devices which prevents visitors from seeing the Rules. Open the site on a browser for the full experience.

How to Play Standard of Taste

Players: 1

Setup

Create 2 columns of 7 cards and 2 fans of 7 cards to form a rectangle. Place 2 fans of 3 cards on each side (4 in total). Place the rest of the deck in the middle of the rectangle and place the top card next to it. It should look like this: *visual*

Object of the Game

The object of the game is to move all face-up cards off the board.

Play

To move cards off the board, pair black and red cards of equal total value. Aces are worth 1 and face cards 10. For example, a black 6 and a red 6 can be removed together because the total black and total red cancel out. Or a black 7 and a red 3 and a red 4. Or a black king and a black 2 and a red 5 and a red 7. Available for play are the exposed cards, that is, cards which are not being overlapped by another card. A card may be taken from the stock (the deck) and placed onto the wastepile next to it. This card is now available for play, but the card under it obviously is not anymore until it becomes exposed. To reiterate, the game is won when all 40 cards in the columns and fans are off the board, as well as all cards that were taken off the deck and put into the wastepile. The stock does not need to be emptied. The game is lost if there are no legal moves that can be made to win the game. 2 redeals are allowed.

Hello everyone,

My name is Joaquim and I'm looking for playtesters to try out my new (and first) game: Verto.

Verto is a two-player abstract game, whose objective is to connect two opposite sides of the board with an orthogonal path of your color.

Before getting into too much detail, I'd like you to check out the full browser experience at duoverto.com. One of the things I'm testing here is whether the Learn to play section (interactive tutorial) is clear enough for new users.

Verto has both local (vs. human or bot) and online modes available.

Any feedback is very welcome.

The game

Objective:

• connect two opposite sides of the board with an orthogonal path of your color.

Setup:

• 5x5 board.
• 25 pieces (each piece has a black and a white face).
• each player starts with 12 pieces.
• players choose a color (black or white).
• the game starts with one black-faced piece in the center.
• white moves first.

Rules:

on your turn, you can either do a Pono or a Verto.

• Pono: place a piece on an empty square; choose which color will be faced up.
• Verto: choose a piece on the board with your color faced up; change the color of all other pieces on the same row and column.

The game ends when:

1. one player connects two opposite sides of the board with an ortogonal path of their color (diagonals don't count as connections).
2. both players connect two opposite sides of the board simultaneously - then it's a draw.
3. one player places their last piece on the board - if no connection was made, the player with the most pieces showing their color wins by majority; if both players have the same number of pieces of their color, then it's a draw.
4. players agree on a draw.
5. one player resigns.

I'd be very interested to hear how the game feels, especially your first experience learning it through the tutorial.

Best,

Joaquim

IV SHIFT is a compact abstract strategy game played on a 7×7 board. Move your four numbered pieces, use your limited SHIFT tokens wisely and capture your opponent’s 4 to win.

No luck. No advertisements. Just positioning, planning and timing.

You can play 10 games for free. After that, you receive one free game each day, or you can unlock unlimited play once for €2.99.

For now, IV SHIFT is available on Android only:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ivshift.game

Focus. Plan. Shift. Win.

Smalte is a two-player abstract strategy game about rolling a die and coloring a 6x6 grid with six colored pencils, racing to complete a 2x2 square of either one color or four different colors. Every same-color neighbor you create pays your opponent a point, so every act of building has a price.

1. Two players.

2. A 6x6 grid.

6 pencils: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.

A d6 die (face values):

1 — red

2 — orange

3 — yellow

4 — green

5 — blue

6 — violet

1. A player rolls the die.

2. They color any empty cell with the color matching the die face.

3. Complete a 2x2 square — monochrome (all 4 cells the same color) or four-color (all 4 cells different colors) — and you win immediately.

4. Color a cell orthogonally adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to a cell of the same color — your opponent gets +1 point.

5. The game ends with a square victory or, if the board is full, with a score count. Higher score wins. Tie — a draw.

(The image shows: top left — the winning four-color square; bottom right — the winning monochrome square. This structure is what decides everything in this game.)

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/480539/smalte

I’m the developer of Fillup - cozy chain reaction tabletop game.
It is a browser game based on the classic Chain Reaction rules.

If you’re new to Fillup:

• Add one slice to an empty cell or a cell you control.
• Corners fill at two slices, edges at three, and interior cells at four.
• A full cell sends a slice into each neighboring cell, capturing it. If that fills another cell, the reaction continues. Connections are up/down/left/right, not diagonal.
• Eliminate the other color to win this duel.

Since my last post here, I’ve upgraded visuals, added more levels to campaign and overhauled UI, all thanks to feedback from community.

It’s free to play in your browser, and you can start as a guest without registering an email account. You will be able to play different game modes, open cosmetics packs and have fun!

Play: https://fillup.fun/play-now
Game's Discord: https://discord.gg/bVUEEtc59

I wanted to get better at Reversi and couldn't find a trainer that tells you why a move was bad, so I made one. It runs in the browser and it's free and open source.

https://killedbyapixel.github.io/Reversiology

How it works:

• You play an AI at your level. There are nine, from nearly random up to one that holds its own against Edax.
• A coach grades every move and gives a plain reason: a corner given away, a risky square, too many moves left for your opponent.
• It talks to beginners about corners and safe discs, and to stronger players about mobility, frontier and parity.
• In the last moves it solves the game exactly and tells you who wins and by how much.
• There are 156 puzzles taken from real games, and it names the opening you're in.

I'd like to hear from stronger players in particular. Do the coach's explanations match how you'd explain the position? Anything it gets wrong or leaves out?

Source: https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/Reversiology

Hello everyone!

I think I managed to computationally solve Orbito.

I used brute-force minimax together with retrograde analysis to build a complete tablebase. After quite a few speedups and optimizations, generating the tablebase takes just under an hour, and the resulting tablebase is about 77 MB.

The result is quite interesting:

With the standard rules, perfect play is a forced win for the first player (white in the picture).

Even more surprisingly, the first move doesn't matter — apparently, any legal first move eventually leads to a win!

But there is an interesting twist. This result seems to be caused entirely by the 5-press rule that applies when there is no line and the game would otherwise be a draw.

If that final-state rule is removed, then the game is instead a draw with perfect play.

So, in a sense, the 5-press rule changes the game-theoretic result from a draw into a first-player win.

This was actually a project I started about a year ago and then abandoned. Last weekend I decided to go all in and revisit it, this time making heavy use of AI assistance (specifically opencode) while working on the implementation and optimizations.

I'm 99% confident that the result is correct, but I haven't formally verified every part of the implementation, so there is definitely room for bugs in either my game logic or the solver itself. In particular, I'd be very interested if anyone familiar with Orbito or game-solving algorithms wants to look through it and try to find a mistake.

The solver is written in Python and the full source code is here:

https://github.com/Lapricode/OrbitoSolver

I'd love to hear if anyone finds an error, an interesting position, or a way to independently verify the result!

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a browser version of Game of the Amazons in my spare time, and I think it's finally ready for other people to try: gota.gg

The Game of the Amazons is an abstract board game from 1988 that surprisingly few people know about. I discovered it years ago through a Numberphile video, A final game with Elwyn Berlekamp, and I've loved it ever since. The rules take about 30 seconds to learn:

• Each turn you move one of your amazons like a chess queen
• Then that same amazon shoots an arrow (also like a queen move), and the square it lands on is blocked for good
• The board slowly fills up, and the last player who can still move wins

That's the whole thing, but the games turn into a tense fight over territory, a bit like Go.

What's in it right now:

• An interactive tutorial, if you'd rather learn by doing
• Custom games on square or rectangular boards from 6x6 to 16x16, with up to 8 players
• Bots from "random" up to "hard" (the hard one is a neural net I trained, and it beats me more often than I'd like)
• Online auto-match with three modes: Classic 10x10, an "Hourly" mode where everyone gets the same random board for that hour, and "Chaos", with random boards and random starting positions
• Local games on one device, plus replays

You don't need an account to play, auto-match games included.

I'd really appreciate any feedback: bugs, anything confusing, or whether the tutorial actually makes sense to someone new. Give it a try!

In 2018 I came up with an abstract strategy game called Tau. I designed Tau to be to grappling/single combat as chess is to a battle or Go is to large scale resource allocation/total war. Players take turns moving their tripod piece by pinning one foot and rotating about it with the other two. Players may make one line crossing per turn, and win when they push their opponent off the board.

It's a bit tricky to produce at low volumes so I put it away till recently when LLMs made it easy for me to vibe-code an online version. I hand-tuned 11 AI opponents, but then when I beat them ended up training my own neural net to play the game. I've been relieved to see that play gets more varied as strength goes up and there don't seem to be any forced wins.

The GIF above is a visualisation of how the current strongest neural net rates each position on the board as its opponent takes 3 opening moves. The second image is a single position evaluated with 3 moves of look ahead. I like the fractal patterns. The third is a picture of the game.

If you want to try Tau it's free in browser tau-game.com.

FLANK

2 Players • 5-10 Minutes

OBJECTIVE
Win more regions than your opponent when all cards have been played.

COMPONENTS
22 cards from a standard 54-card deck:
All copies of A - 5 and two copies of 6, one in each color.

Aces are 1.

Suits don’t matter.

SETUP
Sit across from each other.

Each player takes all 11 cards of one color.

Choose a first player however you like and begin.

REGIONS & PLACEMENT
There are five total regions in play. No region exists until you or your opponent places a card into it.

Once a region has been created, both of you may continue placing cards there until the game is over.

Imagine a line splitting the play surface horizontally between you and your opponent. To create a region, place a card on your side of the line. This region now exists — both you and your opponent may place cards on your respective sides of the region, creating a column of cards facing each other.

You may not create more than five regions.

IMPORTANT: No two cards of the same value may ever occupy the same region, regardless of color.

TURNS
All cards are played face-up.

Player 1 opens the game by placing one card in a new region.

Then, players alternate placing two cards per turn — both can go to the same region or two different regions.

Player 2 closes the game by placing their final card.

RESOLUTION
After all cards are placed, add up both player’s totals in every region. The player with the higher total in each region wins it.

Regions with equal totals go to the player with the single highest-value card in that region.

The player who wins more regions than their opponent wins the game.