Abstract strategy games

Chess is a board game for two players, played on a square board consisting of 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The players, referred to as "White" and "Black", each control sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns, with each piece type having a different pattern of movement. An enemy piece may be captured (removed from the board) by moving one's own piece onto the square it occupies. The object of the game is to "checkmate" (threaten with inescapable capture) the enemy king. There are also several ways a game can end in a draw.

board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago

Checkers (North American English), also known as draughts (; British English), is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".

Sudoku (; ; originally called Number Place) is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid (also called "boxes", "blocks", or "regions") contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which, for a well-posed puzzle, has a single solution.

Xiangqi (; ), commonly known as Chinese chess or elephant chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is the most popular board game in China. Xiangqi is in the same family of games as shogi, janggi, Western chess, chaturanga, and Indian chess. Besides China and areas with significant ethnic Chinese communities, this game is also a popular pastime in Vietnam, where it is known as '''''', literally 'General's chess', in contrast with Western chess or '''', literally 'King's chess'.

, also known as Japanese chess, is an abstract strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, Makruk, and janggi. Shōgi means general's (shō ) board game (gi ). The term shōgi is most commonly used to describe hon-shōgi ("standard shogi"), a term used to distinguish the most popular form of the game (with an 81-square board and 40 pieces) from other forms like ko-shogi (ancient shogi variants like chu shogi), modern shogi variants, and related games.

Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid, one with Xs and the other with Os. A player wins when they mark all three spaces of a row, column, or diagonal of the grid, whereupon they traditionally draw a line through those three marks to indicate the win. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players.

thumb|Chess set from Rajasthan, India Chaturanga (, , ) is an ancient Indian strategy board game. It is first known from India around the seventh century AD.

guessing game

Reversi is an abstract strategy board game for two players, played on an 8×8 uncheckered board. It was invented in 1883. Othello, a variant with a fixed initial setup of the board, was patented in 1971.

abstract strategy board game

board game

Arimaa () is a two-player strategy board game that was designed to be playable with a standard chess set and difficult for computers while still being easy to learn and fun to play for humans. It was invented between 1997 and 2002 by Omar Syed. Arimaa is a complex abstract strategy game and after decades of play, a body of theory has developed among high level players, along with a few books on the game. Arimaa has also developed a community on the internet, where tournaments are played.

Stratego ( ) is a chess-like strategy board wargame for two players on a board of 10×10 squares. Each player controls an army of 40 pieces representing individual officer and soldier ranks through a numbering scheme. The pieces have Napoleonic insignia. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag or to capture all movable enemy pieces so that the opponent cannot make any further moves. Stratego has simple rules but a depth of strategy.

children's board game

Gomoku, also called five in a row, is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces (black and white stones) on a 15×15 Go board while in the past a 19×19 board was standard. Because pieces are typically not moved or removed from the board, gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names.

board game

Halma (from , meaning “leap") is a strategy board game invented in 1883 or 1884 by George Howard Monks, an American thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School. His inspiration was the English game Hoppity which was devised in 1854.

Janggi (, also romanized as changgi or jangki), sometimes called Korean chess, is a strategy board game popular on the Korean Peninsula. The game was derived from xiangqi (Chinese chess), and is very similar to it, including the starting position of some of the pieces, and the 9×10 gameboard, but without the xiangqi "river" dividing the board horizontally in the middle.

abstract strategy game

Alquerque (also known as al-qirkat from ) is a strategy board game that is thought to have originated in the Middle East. It is considered to be the parent of draughts (US: checkers) and Fanorona and the diagonals of its grid are the predecessor of the checkering of the draughts board.

group of asymmetric boardgames

Quoridor is a two- or four-player intuitive strategy game designed by Mirko Marchesi and published by Gigamic Games. Quoridor received the Mensa Mind Game award in 1997 and the Game Of The Year in the United States, France, Canada and Belgium.

1987 board game

1991 board game

Renju () is a professional variant of the abstract strategy board game gomoku. It was named renju by Japanese journalist Ruikou Kuroiwa (黒岩涙香) on December 6, 1899, in a Japanese newspaper Yorozu chouhou (萬朝報). The name "renju" means "connected pearls" in Japanese. The game is played with black and white stones on a 15×15 gridded go board.

Blokus ( ) is an abstract strategy board game for two to four players, where players try to score points by occupying most of the board with pieces of their color. The board is a square regular grid and the pieces are polyominoes. Blokus was designed by the French biophysicist Bernard Tavitian and first released in 2000 by Sekkoïa, a French company.

medieval chess variant

Tantrix is a hexagonal tile-based abstract game invented by Mike McManaway from New Zealand. Each of the 56 different tiles in the set contains three lines, going from one edge of the tile to another. No two lines on a tile have the same colour. There are four colours in the set: red, yellow, blue, and green. No two tiles are identical, and each is individually numbered from 1 through 56.

Fanorona () is a strategy board game for two players. The game is indigenous to Madagascar.

abstract two-player strategy game

two-player strategy board game played throughout the Roman Empire

thumb|Pentago Winning Position for White

250px|thumb|Brass playing board and tokens thumb|Bagh Chal table Bagh-chal ( bāgh cāl, dhun kasa meaning "tiger game") is a strategic, two-player board game that originated in Nepal. The game is asymmetric in that one player controls four tigers and the other player controls up to twenty goats. The tigers 'hunt' the goats while the goats attempt to block the tigers' movements. This game is also seen in southern India with a different board, but the rules are the same. This game is popular in rural areas of the country.

Board game draughts

traditional Chinese board game

game whose outcome can be correctly predicted

category of board games for two players, where one player is the fox and tries to eat the geese/sheep

chess variant played on a circular board

chess variant

thumb|A move in the game of Chomp, removing two blocks: a player has chosen a block to "eat", and must also eat the block below it. The top-left block is "poisoned" and whoever eats it loses the game. Chomp is a two-player strategy game played on a rectangular grid made up of smaller square cells, which can be thought of as the blocks of a chocolate bar. The players take it in turns to choose one block and "eat it" (remove from the board), together with those that are below it and to its right. The top left block is "poisoned" and the player who eats this loses.

Chinese military chess (luzhanqi) () (lit. “Land Battle Chess”) is a two-player Chinese board game . There is also a version for four players. It bears many similarities to dou shou qi, Game of the Generals and the Western board game Stratego. It is a non-perfect abstract strategy game of partial information, since each player has only limited knowledge concerning the disposition of the opposing pieces. Because of the Chinese nature of the game, terms used within the game may vary in translation.

strategy game that minimizes luck and does not rely on a theme

board game

abstract strategy game

strategy board game

Variant of draughts played in the Mediterranean and Middle East

board game

2001 strategic board game

DVONN is a two-player strategy board game in which the objective is to accumulate pieces in stacks. It was released in 2001 by Kris Burm as the fourth game in the GIPF Project. DVONN won the 2002 International Gamers Award and the Games magazine Game of the Year Award in 2003.

abstract strategy board game

Board Game from Surakarta

Ataxx (アタックス) is a strategy video game published in arcades by Leland Corporation in 1990. Two players compete on a seven-by-seven square grid. The object of the game is for a player to have a majority of the pieces on the board at the end, by converting as many of their opponent's pieces as possible. In a single-player game, the opponents are "bio-invaders from a different dimension."

ZÈRTZ is the third game in the GIPF Project of seven abstract strategy games. The game features a shrinking board and an object that promotes sacrifice combinations. It is impartial: since neither player owns on-board pieces, maintaining the initiative is of fundamental importance.

series of seven abstract strategy board games for two players

YINSH is an abstract strategy board game by game designer Kris Burm. It is the fifth game to be released in the GIPF Project. At the time of its release in 2003, Burm stated that he intended it to be considered as the sixth and last game of the project, and that the game which he had not yet released, PÜNCT, would be logically the fifth game. However, the series was later expanded to seven games with the release of LYNGK.

thumb|1554 illustration of a Rithmomachy board and pieces by Claude de Boissière Rithmomachia (also known as rithmomachy, arithmomachia, rythmomachy, rhythmomachy, the '''philosophers' game''', and other variants) is an early European mathematical board game. Its earliest known description dates from the eleventh century. The name comes loosely from Greek and means "The Battle of the Numbers." The game is somewhat like chess except that most methods of capture depend on the numbers inscribed on each piece.

board game

Pente is an abstract strategy board game for two or more players, created in 1977 by Gary Gabrel. A member of the m,n,k game family, Pente stands out for its custodial capture mechanic, which allows players to "sandwich" pairs of stones and capture them by flanking them on either side. This changes the overall tactical assessments players face when compared to pure placement m,n,k games such as Gomoku.

thumb|A game of phutball after five men have been placed (the ball has yet to move)