Hey everyone! We’re building Go Together, a game based on the classic board game Go.

You can play against our own AI, KataGo, and our adaptation of Michi, or challenge a friend locally on the same device.

Online multiplayer is coming soon. We’re also working on a seasonal leaderboard where players can compete for rankings by taking on popular Go AI opponents.

Check it out on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5375470/Go_Together/

We’d love to hear your thoughts and what you’d like to see!

https://dansideadump.nekoweb.org/Skirrid

Did this as an experiment with GPT Astra - just fed this prompt "create an html version of Skirrid. 2 player human vs computer. lots of sound effects and visual effects. emphasis on being an exact clone of board, pieces and rules."

Had a think about it for 15 minutes and spat out pretty much the complete thing (I tweaked the User Interface) but the AI has just magically emerged from a description of the rules. Pretty amazing.

The rules are included on the link.

I made a xiangqi app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with piece sets for people who can't read the characters

I think the characters are what keep most western players from trying xiangqi. In the traditional set in my app, red and black use a different character for every piece type (帥 and 將 are both the general, 兵 and 卒 both the soldier), so a beginner has fourteen symbols to learn before they can read the starting position.

So Xiangqiful has three sets: the characters, chess-style icons, and a hybrid that puts a small icon above the character, so you pick the characters up as you play. You can switch any time.

There are 80 lessons, 40 computer opponents and 902 mate problems, mate-in-1 to mate-in-7. Most of the problems come from eight classical manuals, 橘中秘 and 适情雅趣 among them. I re-checked every line and dropped the ones where the book's solution doesn't work. After a game, Pikafish (the Stockfish-derived xiangqi engine) reviews your moves, and the positions where you went wrong come back later as puzzles. It all runs on the device and needs no account.

It's free to download. The lessons and the first ten opponents stay free; puzzles and game reviews have a daily cap unless you get premium ($1.99/month, $9.99/year or $19.99 once).

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794340136

Anykind of feedback is more than welcomed!

Qubic has always fascinated me: four in a row in a 4×4×4 cube. Sixty-four cells, seventy-six winning lines, and lines through the diagonals of the cube that a flat board never has. Most of them are invisible until someone completes one against you.

I made a version for iOS called Quadrim, and a few things I learned about the game while building it might interest people here:

• Sixteen cells sit on seven lines each; the other forty-eight sit on four. Those sixteen are the eight corners and the eight inner cells, and under the cube's symmetries they are the same class. "Take the centre" and "take the corners" are one strategy seen from two sides.
• A preference for the corners can't be a difficulty level. I tried to build a ladder of opponents by which squares they prefer. Measured head to head, corners-first beat centre-first, centre-first beat centre-only, and centre-only beat corners-first: rock-paper-scissors. What really separates players is how many of those sixteen cells they value at all, and above all whether they see the opponent's forcing sequences coming.
• The game is solved. Oren Patashnik proved in 1980 that the first player can always force a win, with a strategy of about 2,900 key moves he worked out in 1976–77. The strongest opponent in the app plays from that strategy, so it cannot be beaten when it moves first. When you move first a win is possible in theory, but only with perfect play, and you learn a lot trying.

What's in it:

• 31 computer opponents with fixed ratings, from one that barely notices a threat to the perfect player. Your own rating moves like a chess rating.
• Two ways to see the board: four flat layers side by side, or one 3D cube of glass cells that you can turn and zoom.
• A tutorial that teaches the lines rather than the buttons, and pass-and-play for two people on one phone.
• Fully offline, with no account and no ads. The first month is unlimited; after that it's free for three games a day against the computer, and pass-and-play is never limited.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/quadrim/id6804034367 Android is in a closed test; you can ask for access with the form on https://evict.nl/quadrim.

The source is on GitHub if you're curious how the opponents work: https://github.com/evermeer/Quadrim

I'm curious how people here approach the game: do you play for the seven-line cells, or think in forcing sequences from the start?

In a change of pace from the flood of AI game spam, I just wanted to remind people that there will be the yearly Zertz tournament on Boardspace this weekend.

https://boardspace.net/BB/viewtopic.php?t=1002

To quote the post:

• will start on October 17th
• and as always is self-scheduled at times arranged between the players.
• A swiss (or similar) tournament mode will be used.
• Everyone is going to play 5 rounds.

Hello everyone,

I just created a new website called limill.org for playing Nine Men's Morris online.

It is based on lichess.org (the open source chess website) and is similarly free of advertisments and payments. It is also open source at codeberg. Currently, there is basically no one playing there yet and my dream would be to create a common community of Nine Men's Morris players instead of these large amounts of fragmented board game websites regarding Nine Men's Morris. Feel free to let me know of any improvements and suggestions you have for the site itself and maybe also for the longer term vision as well. Currently, there are almost no players so you can test playing against the computer or maybe coordinate with a friend or get lucky to see someone there (hopefully this reddit post might very slowly help with that). I know that still need to improve the computer opponent and also I am not sure about the amount of time controls on the quick pairing page (I think I might need to simplify this a lot but I am not sure how yet).

Thank you!

What happens if you add a third colour to Connect Four—and the other two players cooperate against you?

Here's a demonstration of proof being calculated...

https://dansideadump.nekoweb.org/connectDRAW

I’ve been exploring whether the first player can guarantee a draw in this variant. An AI-assisted solver I ran returned a stronger result: players 2 and 3 can apparently force one of themselves to win, regardless of player 1’s moves.

The rules

• Standard board: 7 columns, 6 rows, initially empty.
• Three players with separate colours, taking turns in the order 1 → 2 → 3.
• Normal gravity: counters fall to the lowest empty space in a column.
• Four counters of a single colour in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line win immediately.
• A full board without a winner is a draw.
• Players 2 and 3 coordinate their moves, but their colours cannot combine to make a winning line.

What the search tested

The solver asked whether player 1 could guarantee either a win or a draw against every coordinated response from players 2 and 3.

It returned NO from the empty board. If the implementation is correct, this rules out a guaranteed draw as well: any strategy guaranteeing a draw would also satisfy the win-or-draw objective.

This doesn’t mean every game ends with player 1 losing. The opponents must choose the right coordinated moves. It also doesn’t mean a particular teammate always wins—the winner could depend on player 1’s choices.

How it was calculated

The program uses a complete Boolean game-tree search without a heuristic depth limit. At player 1’s turns, it looks for at least one successful move; at either opponent’s turn, player 1’s defence must survive every available move.

To reduce the search, it uses cached positions, left–right symmetry, immediate winning threats, forced blocks and deductions about permanently blocked winning lines.

My completed run took approximately 4 minutes 12 seconds, recording 299,598,157 recursive search calls. These are calls, not distinct positions.

How confident should we be?

I’m treating this as a provisional computational result. ChatGPT helped generate the solver and tests. Preliminary checks matched a separate unpruned evaluator on 250 generated positions, mostly late-game positions, plus three terminal cases. However, the full empty-board result has not been independently reproduced, and there is no separately verified strategy certificate yet.

Has anyone studied this particular three-player coalition variant? I’d be interested in related results, a human-readable explanation of the coalition’s advantage, or someone independently reproducing the outcome.

Full Paper here.. https://dansideadump.nekoweb.org/connectDRAWpaper

I’d like to introduce a chess variant I’ve spent over a year building, which now has a fully playable showcase you can try right now.

Imagine a traditional FIDE Chess Olympiad match: four games being played side-by-side in a single line. Imagine the players holding their defense, pushing their pawns, but constantly glancing over their shoulders at their teammates' boards. They wonder how their boards are holding up, wishing there was anything they could do to help a teammate who is getting squeezed on Board 3 for example.

Olympiad Chess explores that exact "what if."

In this variant, all four boards are physically connected down the middle, sharing a single "Nexus" across ranks 4 and 5. Through this corridor, players can traverse across boards to launch flank attacks against the opponent's captain, reinforce a teammate who is cornered, or fight for control of the central lane to assert dominance across the entire match.

The idea literally came to me in my sleep last May. I couldn't stop thinking about it for days I started loosing sleep over the idea, so I decided to build a functioning prototype to see if the geometry actually worked. Later in August, watching the first ever Chess Esports World Cup and the 7-match clash between Magnus and Hikaru, it completed the vision for me: competitive chess could be an incredible team esport, or a brand new entry in Chess Olympiads if players were actually forced to cooperate on the board, rather than just tallying up four isolated 1v1 scores at the end.

Most multiplayer chess variants (like 3-player or 4-player chess) alter the board's shape too much in my opinion. Olympiad Chess takes a modular approach instead. By linking the middle ranks 4 and 5 as a shared space, standard 8x8 boards sit side-by-side just like an Olympiad table. Every single piece movement, capture, and rule remains classical chess—pure calculation, no RNG, no cards, and no gimmicks.

I didn't want to overcomplicate the game or reinvent the wheel. The rules are immediately intuitive because it’s fundamentally just the chess you and I already know, scaled into a synchronized team format.

Now, I’m acutely aware of the possible skepticism: many people feel that multiplayer chess variants are a lost cause, dead on arrival, because it’s already hard enough to find people to play with, let alone a lobby with up to 8-player. But having play tested this over and over myself, the tactical depth, team banter, and clutch comebacks are very much real, the fun, the competition is there! And for smaller groups, you can play asymmetric skirmishes like 1v2, 2v3, or against bots.

After more than a year of solo development, I have a complete showcase ready. I'm only a month or two away from full release, and I wanted to put the demo out to the community to see how it's received and hear your feedback.

You can drop your thoughts right here in the comments, or try the free demo on Steam:

Steam Page & Playable Demo: Here & here.

Official Guide / Rulebook: Here.

EDIT: Below is a short gameplay footage I just recorded.

https://reddit.com/link/1x3duvn/video/uklocudhqvuh1/player

Group all your pieces into one connected group. Simple rules, deep self-organization dynamics. Play vs AI.
https://selfo.games/

Unitile is a tile sliding game similar to the tile sliding puzzle. But has two players and two colors of tiles. The goal is to bring all of your tiles together into a group.

Diarchy is a Go-inspired two player territory game, with Knizia-style scoring, simply put you're playing a territory game with two separate colors, and your weaker color's territory counts twice as much as your stronger color's.

My site has a rulebook, but I think learning from the interactive lessons is easier and faster:

https://www.playdiarchy.com/learn

Or, you could just jump in and play! I'm waiting in the correspondence queue pretty much all the time. Thanks for checking it out!

A design question, with a playable example.

Pawnkeep Chess 6x6 is Los Alamos-style chess (6x6, no bishops, no castling, pawns step one and promote to a Queen) with one addition: a captured enemy pawn goes into your reserve, and you can later drop it on any empty square in the middle four ranks.

Against the CPU I added a comeback rule: if you win 2+ games in a row, Black starts the next game with 2 reserve pawns. It's meant to keep repeat games tense without changing the rules themselves.

What I'm wrestling with:

• Is a handicap that depends on history (your streak) cleaner or messier than a fixed setup change, like a different starting position or a komi-style offset?
• In a drop game, is a reserve piece worth more than the same piece on the board? It feels like it, because you choose where it arrives.
• Would you rather see the handicap offered as an option than applied automatically?

Free to play in the browser against a negamax CPU, no account: https://mchatai.com/hub/pawnkeep-chess-6x6

Disclosure: I'm the software developer, and I built it with heavy help from AI coding tools.

SNAKY -- The game. Frank Harary's generalized tic-tac-toe game appeared in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in April 1979. The Breaker has to prevent the Maker from making a snaky shape.
◼︎◼︎◻︎◻︎◻︎
◻︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎
This is part of a large proof by Trevor Morris, OpenAI and Claude. Back in 1979, Frank Harary conjectured that the Maker could win on a 15x15 board. Turns out, he was correct.

For reference, I mean this banner .

I think I can recognize Tzaar, Hex, Looney Pyramids -- Pikemen, some sort of Go game, possibly some sort of Shibumi game system game (Akron?), Hive, and one I absolutely cannot recognize.

A very good selection of modern abstracts.

I built a backgammon site and thought people here might want to try it: https://backgammon.danelthedev.com/

- Online play via lobby codes, no account needed beyond a username

- Two bots: Fruit Fly Bot (weak, good for learning) and Hard Bot (gnubg-based, actually challenging)

- Dice logic is in the open-source repo for anyone who wants to check it: https://github.com/danelthedev/fair_backgammon

- Optional variants: negative dice, bigger dice, power-ups, custom boards, doubling cube, Romanian marț tehnic

- Hotseat mode included

Tic Tac Shuffle is tic-tac-toe mixed with shuffleboard. Pieces slide in from the edge, push whatever's in the way. When a row is full, anything shoved off the edge is gone. The row you built last turn can be pushed apart. Push the wrong piece and you finish your opponent's line for them. Every move is an opportunity and a liability.

Rules: 4x4 grid, 16 entry points, a piece slides until it hits something. Each move can be used once, and then, when all 16 moves are used, they can be reset. Four in a row scores: 2 for a row, 3 for a column, 5 for a diagonal. First to 10 wins the match. Draws are possible.

Three things I want this crowd's take on:

• What's in this game family besides Quixo and Abalone?
• Is the race to 10 a good mechanic?

Free on iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6758967619?pt=128484550&ct=r/abstractgames&mt=8

Built with AI coding assistance; the rules, scoring, and design are mine.

Hi all,

I've been building playboardgames.org, a free site for classic board games in the browser. No account, no download. You can play the computer, pass-and-play on one device, or send a friend a room code.

The abstract side so far: Chess and Chess960, Go, Shogi, Hasami Shogi (just added, with Dai Hasami and the tenbin rules), Hnefatafl with four tafl rule sets, Hex, Reversi, Five in a Row, Nine Men's Morris, Checkers and International Draughts, Mancala, Dots and Boxes, and Chinese Checkers.

I'd like the next ones to come from people who actually play these. What would you want to play online that's hard to find? I've been looking at Fanorona, Lines of Action, Game of the Amazons, Breakthrough and Konane, but I'm open to anything.

Bug reports, bots that are too weak or too strong, and rule variants I got wrong are all welcome too.

https://playboardgames.org/games/board

It started simply

I wanted to build a physical Reversi set where a full game could play out without ever needing a screen. For that, the board itself had to say "whose turn it is, where the last move landed, who won" with no display at all. The answer I landed on was LED color and animation: each cell's color and motion became words in a language for stating the game's state.

Once I'd built this "language of light" for Reversi, I realized there was no real reason to keep it locked to just one game. If an 8x8 grid can say anything through color, there's no limit to the stories you can write on it. So I started writing other stories in the same language, and five of them are live now. At this point I wanted to see whether this language could actually communicate with all kinds of people.

• Reversi FL!P : the first sentence in this language, and where it all started. Standard rules, real-time matches, ranked play, and game review.
• Baduk FL!P : an attempt to translate the grammar of 19-line Go into an 8x8 dialect. Even if you've never played Go, you can pick up a game without much pressure.
• Gomoku FL!P : a fast-paced variant written in the same grammar.
• Connect 4 FL!P : same gravity, rebuilt for an 8x8 board.
• Match 3 FL!P : a brand-new sentence written in this language: match 3 or more in the middle and that row gets pulled toward your opponent, shrinking their line.

Link: https://flipcongames.com

Would love it if you gave it a try and shared any feedback. Next time, I'll show how this language actually plays out on real hardware!

Eventually I'd like to open this language up so anyone can write in it themselves. Still just an idea for now, but I plan to keep covering it, piece by piece, in future devlog posts.

Hey r/abstractgames!

I’m the developer behind Gomoku Party, and I’d love to invite you to join our community.

Some of the strongest Gomoku players are gathering here, so if you enjoy deep tactical battles and tough opponents, come put your skills to the test!

New to Gomoku? You’re welcome too. Five in a row sounds simple, but there’s plenty to discover: forcing sequences, tricky defenses, and the moment you realize your opponent’s quiet move was anything but harmless.

We have ranked matches, Swap2, tournaments, and tactical puzzles. It’s free to play, and you can jump straight into your browser without downloading anything.

Join us and play a few games →

Bring a friend, challenge the regulars, and tell me what you think. I’d love to hear what this community wants from a Gomoku platform.

See you across the board!

I posted a gameplay video of this a while back. It's had a big update since, so here's a proper trailer.

GoYomi is a free 9×9 Go game that runs in your browser. You play an AI at your level while a coach grades every move and explains why.

New since last time:

• Every AI level now runs KataGo in the browser: much stronger and faster
• A better coach, which can hide its move so you find the better one yourself
• "Their idea" shows what your opponent is planning
• Play by keyboard or with a screen reader

Play: https://killedbyapixel.github.io/GoYomi

I'd like to hear from stronger players whether the coach's explanations match how you'd explain the position.