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.
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and have since been dwindling back down) are not merely gems waiting to be rediscovered, but instead appeal to outdated tastes in gaming, and are unlikely to be replicated given market realities.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.
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.
'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.
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").
abstractbg•6d ago
If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
zem•3h ago
abstractbg•2h ago
quuxplusone•1h ago
https://club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/free-software/pento/pento.html
abstractbg•1h ago
7373737373•2h ago
abstractbg•2h ago
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.
ixwt•2h ago
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
abstractbg•2h ago
sloum•2h ago
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