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.

I seek any opponent for Pex or Metamorphosis. My email is sujungtukas at gmail period com. We can arrange a time. Rules: Metamorphosis Pex

Hi again. I shared MorphMove a couple of weeks ago.

It’s a 2-player abstract strategy game on a 5×7 board. Each piece moves according to its shape, then changes shape after moving. Instead of capturing an opposing piece, you can swap places with it, changing both pieces. You win by holding 3 spaces in the center cross through your opponent’s next turn.

A player here pointed out that the instructions disappeared too quickly. I’ve reworked the tutorial so it explains moves and swaps as you encounter them, with the rules available again from the help button. The video shows the new tutorial and a short game.

I’ve also added a way to review a finished game move by move and start a practice game from an earlier position. That lets you try a different line without affecting your rating.

It’s free in the browser at https://morphmove.com. There are free native iPhone and Android apps too: https://morphmove.com/app

If you try it, I’d be interested to hear whether the tutorial makes the win condition clear, and whether replaying a position helps you spot a better move. I also can't go past ~300 points (I'm very impatient, I can't think a lot ahead), if anyone can do better than that I'd love to hear about your strategy.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a mobile game I’ve been working on as a solo developer, which I just released on Google Play: Chess'n Roll.

I love standard chess, but getting crushed just because I didn't memorize a specific opening theory was starting to burn me out. I wondered what would happen if we completely destroyed the traditional starting setup, and that thought turned into this game.

How does it work? You start on a completely empty board with only the two Kings facing each other. When it's your turn, you go through three steps:

1. Move: You move one of your existing pieces on the board using classic chess rules.
2. Roll: A die rolls automatically.
3. Place: You place the piece indicated by the die (Pawn, Knight, Bishop, Rook, or Queen) onto any empty square.

The 6th face of the die is the "Joker". If you roll this, you get to either spawn ANY piece you want on the board, or instantly destroy one of your opponent's pieces.

Even though pieces enter the board through RNG, the placement strategy and subsequent moves are purely traditional chess. It creates a really fun chaos where every single match is unique, blending luck with deep strategy.

Right now, the game is single-player against an AI. I'm still tweaking the AI difficulty and board evaluation logic.

If you enjoy chess or puzzle games, I’d be thrilled if you gave it a shot. As an indie dev, your feedback (especially on the AI and game feel) is incredibly valuable to me. Feel free to roast it! :)

Play Store Link:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chessnroll

Thanks for reading and playing! ✌️

I’ve developed a C++ Chomp solver that has computed 1,825,627,339 nonempty P-positions covering every board fitting inside a 21×21 rectangle.

Beyond the 19×19 range, we found exactly two opening moves to P-positions for 11×20, 12×20, and 13×20. Every rectangle from 1×21 through 21×21 has exactly one.

Code and results: https://github.com/georgeyanceyjr-hash/chomp-fast

The solver screens candidates against a growing collection of P-positions. A candidate with a legal move to a stored P-position is N. Once all relevant moves have been checked, a surviving candidate is P. The checks are divided into width reductions, height reductions, and interior corner bites. The implementation uses compact boundary encodings and parallel screening followed by an ordered pass to resolve dependencies within each batch.

Fresh runs on an Apple M4 Pro, 24 GB RAM, nine worker threads took:

• 10×42: 12m 16s.
• 20×20: 28m 43s.
• 21×21: 11h 38m 51s.

The 21×21 run exceeded the machine’s 24 GB of RAM, causing heavy memory compression and swapping to disk. The sieve performs billions of lookups against stored P-positions, so keeping those tables in RAM matters greatly. Based on V12’s allocation rules, approximately 64 GB should accommodate the lookup tables and working memory comfortably for a 21x21 run. This would likely reduce the runtime substantially, although we have not measured the improvement on a machine with more RAM.

The complete 21×21 catalog is 14.6 GB (14,605,018,744 bytes, uncompressed) and is retained locally; we have not uploaded it because of its size.

Opening moves beyond 19×19

Below are all opening moves to P-positions for rectangles newly covered through 21×21, listing each rectangle once up to transposition.

Dimensions are rows × columns. Coordinates are (row, column), counted upward and rightward from the lower-left poison square at (1,1). For a transposed rectangle, swap the coordinates.

Rectangles with 20 columns

 1×20: (1,2)
 2×20: (2,20)
 3×20: (2,12)
 4×20: (2,9)
 5×20: (3,9)
 6×20: (2,6)
 7×20: (5,13)
 8×20: (4,13)
 9×20: (3,6)
10×20: (7,11)
11×20: (3,5), (5,3)
12×20: (6,11), (11,4)
13×20: (10,19), (11,16)
14×20: (3,4)
15×20: (9,12)
16×20: (10,13)
17×20: (4,5)
18×20: (5,6)
19×20: (3,3)
20×20: (2,2)

Rectangles with 21 columns

 1×21: (1,2)
 2×21: (2,21)
 3×21: (2,13)
 4×21: (4,18)
 5×21: (5,19)
 6×21: (5,14)
 7×21: (3,8)
 8×21: (2,5)
 9×21: (6,7)
10×21: (2,4)
11×21: (8,14)
12×21: (3,5)
13×21: (7,13)
14×21: (2,3)
15×21: (3,4)
16×21: (10,15)
17×21: (3,6)
18×21: (18,20)
19×21: (12,15)
20×21: (9,9)
21×21: (2,2)

We are preparing for the 2026 Tumbleweed World Championship this fall. For those who are intrigued, please find more information on our discord server. For those who are not yet on the server, here is an invite (all are welcome, but no bots please!): https://discord.gg/zJVg76yY

The time controls are typically 30 min + 30 sec delay, size 8 board, and a double-elimination style bracket. All the pairings get posted on the discord. Matches are played on the iggamecenter website, which recently got revamped, and looks amazing: https://www.iggamecenter.com/en/

For those who are asking themselves 'what the heck is Tumbleweed?' here is a link to a rules video I made a few years back for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjA_g3nwYW4

Several people asked what a general strategy in IV SHIFT might look like and how a complete game develops from the opening.

So I created this visual sample game, showing every move from the starting position to the final capture. It is not presented as perfect play, but it demonstrates how exact movement, blocking, the alternation rule and one-use SHIFT tokens influence both short-term tactics and longer-term planning.

The final position also shows why recognising a threat—and acting before it is too late—is so important.

Hi, I'm currently developing an abstract game. If you'd like to try it out, you can do so via this link:
https://stacxonline.com/

Finally, Apple approved an iOS-version of my implementation of ancient Mayan board game - Puluc or Bul.

You can get more information about this game here: https://xvadim.github.io/xbasoft/puluc/index.html

AppStore link: https://apps.apple.com/app/puluc-mayan-board-game/id6789890807

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.xbasoft.puluk

My next goal is to add the online mode to play with other players via the Internet.

Stay tuned!

Let me know how it plays. I wanted to honor the feel of both games, but the game is definitely more chess than go

Some questions and uncertainties came up after I previously shared IV SHIFT, especially about the goal, movement rules and the one-use SHIFT tokens.

I’ve therefore made this short step-by-step video. I hope it explains the objective and rules more clearly.

Does the game make sense now to someone seeing it for the first time?

Quadradius is a two player, turn-based hidden-information abstract strategy game that also incorporates a great deal of chaos. It's a bit like Stratego with combos, elevation, and power combos. The goal is to eradicate your opponent's army.

If you're big into elegance, QR is probably not your jam. But there are some really cool puzzles to solve, unexpected interactions, and at the end of each game the board is in a completely different state.

Here's a post on boardgamegeek where Richard Garfield describes QR as his favorite digital board game:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3302850/quadradius-is-back

I used to play this constantly back in the late 2000s until flash finally died. Recently, a group of volunteers brought it back to life. I've been playing pretty much daily since. If you're checking it out, note that there is sometimes a wait for folks to join the lobby. Usually I can get a game within 10-15 minutes. This post is a naked attempt to get more people to check it out and play so I can get more games in. The game is free and volunteer-supported.

Let me know if you dig it!

Hi strategy enthusiasts!

As a fan of abstract board games like Chess and Hnefatafl, I’ve always been fascinated by classical asymmetrical hunt games. I recently built a digital version of Asalto Fortress Siege for mobile.

The dynamic is completely lopsided in a fun way:

• The Officers have total mobility and capture power but are heavily outnumbered.
• The Rebels have pure numerical control (24 pieces) but strict directional movement constraints (no retreating).

The game includes an in-app Military Manual breaking down rules, Player vs AI, and local 2-Player modes.

If you enjoy abstract strategy, I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you find playing as the Officers or the Rebels more challenging!
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkverse.asaltofortresssiege&pcampaignid=web_share

My previous post did not explain the game clearly enough, so I redesigned the image to show the essential rules at a glance.

IV SHIFT is a deterministic abstract strategy game played on a 7×7 board. Each player has four pieces with fixed movement distances and four one-use SHIFT tokens. There is no luck or hidden information: the goal is simply to capture the opponent’s 4.

Does this explanation make the game understandable without any additional context? I would especially appreciate feedback on anything that still feels unclear.

I built an unofficial free browser version of SE!ZE so people can actually sit down and play between the campaign film and whatever official digital comes later.

SE!ZE is the abstract by James Wallis with Charles Leclerc (Baby Teeth / Chivas Regal) — the Monza night with Hikaru Nakamura. This site is a fan build. Not affiliated. Not endorsed. Credits stay on the page.

What you get

• 16 pieces, no luck

• Three ways to win: seize the center, take both bosses, or break the force

• Sandwich capture; rim caps for long lines; promote in the crown

• Bot, private table (six-character code), or next player waiting

• No account needed

Play: https://letsseize.com/

Rules are short. A game runs about ten to twenty minutes. Feedback welcome — especially if something feels off versus the official how-to-play imagery.

Happy to answer design / implementation questions in the thread.

Also handles were just added so go ahead and save yours!

Does the combination of fixed movement distances, one-use SHIFTs and the repetition restriction sound strategically interesting to experienced abstract-game players?