Somewhere between the chess set in the hall cupboard and the sprawling box with ninety miniatures sits a whole category of game that quietly does more with less. Nothing to draw. Nothing to roll. Nothing hidden behind a screen. If you have ever picked up Hive or Santorini and wondered what shelf it really belongs on, the answer is abstract strategy — one of the oldest corners of the hobby, and one of the most rewarding. Here is what the term means, where it came from, and five worth trying.
What Is an Abstract Strategy Game, Actually?
Three things define the genre, and the third is the one people argue about.
The first is perfect information. Everything sits on the table, all the time — no hand of cards, no face-down tiles, no secret objective. If you lose, you lost to a position you could see the whole time. That is a particular kind of honesty, and not everyone enjoys it.
The second is that luck barely features. No dice, no shuffled deck, no random events. What happens next is decided entirely by what you and your opponent choose to do. Games built this way are sometimes called combinatorial games, and as the standard definition has it, Chess, Go, Checkers and Pente are the textbook cases.
The third is theme, or the lack of it. An abstract can have a setting painted on — a Greek island, a beehive, a drifting ice floe — but the mechanics never lean on the story. Strip the artwork away and the game works exactly the same. That is the real test, and it is why a game can look thoroughly thematic and still be an abstract underneath. Some games sit on the border: Stratego hides information but has no randomness, and Backgammon has dice but is otherwise an abstract to its bones.
A Bit of Context
Abstracts are the oldest games we still play. Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago and remains the oldest pure abstract still played in something close to its original form. Chess is the younger one, descended from the Indian game Chaturanga around 500 CE. Both survived for the same reason: the rules are small enough to carry in your head, and the game underneath them is not.
What has changed is what designers do with those bones. For most of the twentieth century, “abstract” in a games shop meant a wooden board, two colours and no pictures — handsome, austere, and quietly intimidating. The last twenty-five years have kept the mathematics and added everything else. In 2000, Bernard Tavitian turned a geometry problem into a four-player family game with Blokus. A year later John Yianni threw the board away altogether and let the pieces be the board in Hive. And Santorini took a rulebook two steps long and bolted thirty-two rule-breaking god powers onto it. The category did not get simpler. It got considerably better looking, and a great deal more welcoming.
Abstract Strategy Games Worth Trying
If you want to see how much range the genre actually has, here is where we would point you on our shelves:
Hive Pocket — an abstract with no board at all. The hexagonal tiles you place become the playing surface, and the aim is to surround your opponent's queen bee completely, using pieces of either colour. The rule that makes it sing is the One-Hive Rule: you may never move a piece if doing so would split the swarm into two groups. Designed by John Yianni for Gen42 Games in 2001, and the pocket version fits in a jacket.
Santorini (2nd Edition) — the friendliest way into the genre we stock. A turn is two steps: move a builder one space, then add a building level next to them. Get a builder onto a third storey and you win. Then you deal the god cards, each of which breaks one of the rules you have just learned, and the same tiny game becomes several hundred different ones. Thirty minutes, ages 8 and up, and rated best at two players.
Blokus — 84 pieces, 21 shapes in each of four colours, and a 20 by 20 grid that fills up much faster than anyone expects. Every piece you play must touch another of your own colour corner to corner, never edge to edge, which means you spend the whole game squeezing into diagonal gaps while politely blocking everyone else. A Mensa Select winner, and the rare abstract that genuinely works at four.
Hey! That's My Fish — penguins on a floe of hexagonal ice tiles, each showing one, two or three fish. Move a penguin in a straight line as far as you like across empty ice, then remove the tile it left behind and keep it. The board shrinks every single turn, and the cruelty is that you are cutting off your own escape routes at exactly the same rate as everyone else's. Günter Cornett and Alvydas Jakeliunas, 2003.
BOOoop — the Halloween edition of Scott Brady's boop., with ghost cats added. Place a kitten on the quilt and it boops every adjacent piece one space in a straight line. Line up three kittens and they graduate into cats; kittens cannot boop cats, but cats boop everybody. Three cats in a row wins. Twenty minutes, ages 10 and up, and far meaner than the artwork lets on.
Come Have a Think
Abstracts are the easiest games in the shop to demonstrate and the hardest to put down. There is no setup to speak of, nothing to read out, and the whole thing is decided by what the two of you actually do. Come and play one in-store — we will happily set up any of the five above.
We believe the best moments happen around a table, and there is a particular satisfaction in a game where you cannot blame the dice, because there aren't any.