Abstract Strategy

LOKA is a fantastically sculpted Chess sets and a brand new take on playing Chess, brought to you by Alessio Cavatore's River Horse and published by Mantic Games.

LOKA is played with fantasy-inspired Chess pieces, each evoking the powerful imagery of one of the four elements.

From the kickstarter page 'At its heart, LOKA uses the rules of Chess, and Alessio has some significant twists in mind in the form of new mechanics:

Choose your army - Each player get to choose which pieces they put onto the board, meaning both players command different armies on the battlefield – do you field a small but elite force with three Queens, or do you go for a mass horde of Pawns?

Fantasy Scenery – Change the shape of the battlefield with movement blocking terrain that alters the path you’ll take into combat.

Dice Driven Combat – a simple and elegant system using eight sided dice adds some unpredictability to combat, placing extra emphasis on strategy and positioning as pieces build in power with support from their comrades."

By all appearances, it's just two players taking turns laying stones on a 19×19 (or smaller) grid of intersections. But once its basic rules are understood, Go shows its staggering depth. One can see why many people say it's one of the most elegant brain-burning abstract games in history, with players trying to claim territory by walling off sections of the board and surrounding each other's stones. The game doesn't end until the board fills up, or, more often, when both players agree to end it, at which time whoever controls the most territory wins.

The earliest mention of Go (圍棋 (wéi qí)- "surrounding game") appears in the "Analects" of Confucius (551-479 BC), while the earliest physical evidence is a 17×17 Go board discovered in 1952 in a tomb of the former Han dynasty (206 BC- 9 AD). There is a tangle of conflicting popular and scholarly anecdotes attributing its invention to two Chinese emperors, an imperial vassal and court astrologers. One story has it that Go was invented by the legendary Emperor Yao (ruled 2357-2256 BC) as an amusement for his idiot son. A second claims that the Emperor Shun (ruled 2255-2205 BC) created the game in hopes of improving his weak-minded son's mental prowess. A third says the person named Wu, a vassal of the Emperor Jie (ruled 1818-1766 BC), invented Go (as well as games of cards). Finally, a fourth story suggests that Go was developed by court astrologers during the Zhou dynasty (1045-255 BC).

A Go set, consisting of a very general-purpose grid and colored stones, can also be used to play a variety of other abstract strategy games, such as Connect6, Go-Moku, Pente, and others.

Circular Reasoning is an abstract strategy game developed by two students at the University of Texas at Dallas, Tomer Braff and Edward Stevenson, under the name "Giant Shoulder Productions". After being featured at IndieCade 2014, Circular Reasoning was then picked up by Ad Magic and is now being published under Breaking Games.

The board consists of a goal in the center and three concentric tracks of 16 spaces each. Each track has a gate to the next level, but the gates rotate around the board according to the number of tokens found in each level.

Each player gets a square, a triangle, and a circle, which move four, three, or two spaces respectively. In addition to racing toward the center, tokens can be used to block other tokens from using the gates to advance. Because of this, players must predict and work around their opponents moves to secure victory.

The abstract game of Qwirkle consists of 108 wooden blocks with six different shapes in six different colors. There is no board, players simply use an available flat surface.

Players begin the game with six blocks. The start player places blocks of a single matching attribute (color or shape but not both) on the table. Thereafter, a player adds blocks adjacent to at least one previously played block. The blocks must all be played in a line and match, without duplicates, either the color or shape of the previous block.

Players score one point for each block played plus all blocks adjacent. It is possible for a block to score in more than one direction. If a player completes a line containing all six shapes or colors, an additional six points are scored. The player then refills his hand to six blocks.

The game ends when the draw bag is depleted and one player plays all of his remaining blocks, earning a six point bonus. The player with the high score wins.

In Barony, players are ambitious barons trying to extend their dominion over the land! Who will succeed and become the new king?

At the beginning of the game, players create the board at random with nine tiles per player; each tile is comprised of three hexagons, with each hexagon being one of five landscape types: forest, plains, field, mountain, lake. Players then each place three cities on the game board, with a knight in each city. They then take turns in clockwise order, with each player taking exactly one action from the six possible actions:

Recruitment: Add two knights to a city, or three knights if the city is adjacent to a lake.
Movement: Move one or two of your knights one space each. A knight can't enter a lake (blub), a mountain with an opposing pawn, or any space with an opponent's city or stronghold or two knights of the same opposing color. If you move a second knight into a space with an opposing pawn or village, remove those tokens and take one resource from the village owner.
Construction: Remove one or more of your knights from the game board and replace each with a village or stronghold, gaining one resource token matching the landscape under the structure.
New City: Replace one of your villages with a city and earn 10 victory points (VPs).
Expedition: Remove two knights from your reserve, placing one back in the box out of play and the other on any empty space on the edge of the game board.
Noble Title: Discard at least 15 resource points, then upgrade your title: baron to viscount, then count, marquis and finally duke.

Once any player has gained the title of duke, finish the round, then tally the VPs, with players scoring for resources still in their possession, their rank in the game, and the number of cities they built. Whoever has the most VPs wins.