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Comment by sndwnm | Hacker News Reader

As more powerful AI computation capabilities become available to hobbyists, I hope someone takes up researching new board games similar to Go, Chess and the other giants of abstract strategy games (ASG).

Basically, train really strong AI players using the AlphaZero method with the rules of the game changed by a human author (either some variant of Go, or a completely new game). Then take a look at the games the AI plays at its strongest level and let people decide if the game looks interesting enough for them to try play competitively. With the strong AI player already in place, human players would have something to learn from and a serious competitive culture could be born.

In the absence of something like this, I don't think it's surprising the only popular ASGs are very, very old. Modern commercial board games are fine, but they supply a different demand than ASGs.

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You’re unlikely to see another game very similar to Chess or Go, because they have each evolved over time to be the pinnacle of their particular niche, and there’s really only room for one king of each of these hills. There are newer games that are starting to show similar signs of longevity, though: Scrabble, Poker, and Bridge come to mind.

Modern commercial board games and some genres of video game have communities that could continue for a similar length of time, but they’re still too young to have reached a consensus on one or two games; I suspect that’s a few decades out. The good news is that there are some older titles that are still holding their own in the market— to beat out the newcomers hints that there’s some kind of staying power there.

I don't agree with your premise that chess has evolved to be at the pinnacle of its niche (I don't know enough about Go to comment on it). There are a number of interesting variations in chess-like games that, while maintaining the general theme of killing the enemy king, offer aspects of gameplay that chess does not.

Two of the more well known variations are shōgi and xiangqi: Shōgi allows the redeployment of captured pieces, whilst xiangqi limits the movement of a few pieces and has a mechanism for representing artillery. I find that each game has a very different character to that of western chess, even despite the fact that they share a large number of tactical motifs.

Western chess may be the most popular variant world-wide, but that's no indication that it is at any kind of pinnacle.

I think it's fair to call it the pinnacle when talking about the Western world. Both shogi and xiangqi developed from the same base game as chess historically, so I'm not sure how far they venture from the theme compared to something like hnefatafl (which is chess-like but varies considerably in game mechanics when compared with shogi and xiangqi).

Just like Like Go and Poker each have a number of variant rule sets in common use, I mentally group all of these as “chess” based on their common ancestry. I haven’t really studied them enough to know if this is truly justified.

There are countless Abstract Strategy Games out there.

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