Pardon my ignorance, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean by combinatorial…?
From Wikipedia:
Many abstract strategy games also happen to be “combinatorial”; i.e., there is no hidden information, no non-deterministic elements (such as shuffled cards or dice rolls), no simultaneous or hidden movement or setup, and (usually) two players or teams take a finite number of alternating turns.
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Thanks; that’s not a usage I’d have come up with. I guess they mean that you could in theory map out all possible game states, if you had a large enough piece of paper; and that therefore in any given game state there is a single move with the highest probability of leading to a victory.
The Wikipedia definition “a strategy game in which the theme is not important to the experience of playing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_strategy_game) puts games like Splendor firmly in the category of abstract, as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah, as I noted above, the commonly-accepted definition of abstract game covers a wide range of games. Look to the abstract games forum on BGG, though, and you’ll find all the regular posters and designers seem to be exclusively interested in combinatorial games.
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With chess you get resignations, I think, only in the situations where it’s professional or high level because each person knows the game so well you’d have to do something uncharacteristically doofus to have the end point be a mystery.
Let me put it this way: if Kasparov and me were playing in a game Of chess from a situation where he conceded - he’d be dumb to concede at all.
So I think concessions only make sense if you’ve both played games a few times and you can both expect the moves of the opponent to be competent. We play so many new games and there’s often enough randomness that it would not always be possible to say if a win Is inevitable.
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One of my favourite “chessy” games is Confusion (full title “Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War”). It starts off not being combinatorial because you don’t know what any of your pieces can do, but by the end of the game, if it hasn’t been won early on, it can become completely combinatorial as players use logic and deduction to figure out which pieces are which.
Abstract? Possibly not. Chesslike? I’d say so (although there’s some setups that have huge advantages over others). It has its faults but I absolutely love it.
EDIT: and it’s definitely a game where I’ve resigned in having made a terrible blunder where victory was only a few moves away after a long war of attrition!
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Very interesting game that I had never previously heard of, thanks for the introduction!
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My brother is a grumpy git and maintains that chess is the only boardgame he enjoys.
When meeting at Christmas I brought a copy of Knightmare Chess which he turned his nose up at.
We had a single game of regular chess, he captured my queen but I played some wild moves and won. His grumpy mood did not improve.
Santorini is probably my favourite chess alternative with Onitama (With the Wind Spirit) and Hive honourable mentions.
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Good chess story. Pity about the grumpiness, but unfortunately chess can be quite mood-altering in certain circumstances.
Would the new Watergate be considered into the category? I haven’t played it yet, but they have it in the club and I am willing to give it a go…
Like Twilight Struggle, it has card decks, so there’s some randomness to consider.
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I find it kind of terrifying that experienced Go players tend to resign dozens of turns early, before I can figure out who is winning.
This is a “finished” game:
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As a pure two-player full-control full-information plan-your-moves-well-in-advance game, no.
But as a two-player nip-and-tuck game of move and counter-move that retains some of the positive feelings of chess (namely the knife-edge balance between attack and defence) while dispensing with some of the elements that bring out the worst in people (well, me anyway… chess is a game that I avoid because it makes me feel very very stupid), a resounding yes.
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oh it’s great fun. I used to enjoy Stratego when I was a kid. I never owned it but my friend had it and I was always really excited to play it when he brought it to school or Saturday morning board game club.
So much so that when I saw the “wait… now I can see what my opponents’ pieces are but not my own?!” version, I knew I was going to be a fan.
It also comes with these beautiful comically oversized dry erase boards that are decorated to look like leather bound “top secret” file dossiers. They’re used to help you keep track of the logic puzzle (one side for what you know, the other side for what your opponent knows) so players keep referring to them constantly. I played it in the pub and the two of us must have looked like a pair of really indecisive customers staring at the menu for two hours without ordering any food.
The other element of the game that makes it deviate from chess but gives the game a totally different kind of tension is the double agent. Each player has one piece with a big question mark on it that represents an agent working for the opponent, so rather than having a diagram showing what its legal moves are, your opponent simply gets to decide whether or not your move is legal. This creates a beautiful acting challenge - if your opponent asks “can I move this one two spaces forward” and you don’t carefully peer at the front of it pretending to struggle to see the diagram, or if you refer back to your notes trying to remember which piece you disguised it as, the cover is blown. It also leads to some wonderfully shocking moments as you approach the big reveal - the magical “I can’t move two spaces forward? but two turns ago you said I could OOOOOHHHHHHGOD” moment is priceless. That or the slightly rarer but equally dramatic “hold on… this piece is exactly the same as that piece… but that means OOOOOHHHHHHGOD” moment. Love it.
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This sounds great. I also played a lot of Stratego (actually L’Attaque) many years ago, and probably my favourite quick 2-player ‘modern’ game is Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, which has some of the same DNA. Confusion sounds really fun.
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Hey! I invented that!
In all seriousness, my friend had Stratego and I suggested at one point we turn the pieces around and play that way, however this meant that any piece could move, even the flag, which you could easily move into an opponent’s piece and lose, so it was just silly fun rather than anything well thought out. It is not all that surprising to hear that someone did have a similar idea and flesh it out.
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I won’t say it doesn’t have faults, but there’s enough that’s truly clever and plain simple fun that I’m more than willing to overlook them rather than wish they were fixed.
That definition of “Combinatorial” is really helping me work out why I don’t love chess!
I like it fine, even played for the county briefily (badly), but in a short story I wrote I did have the sci-fi culture who prized it be the unimaginative invaders against another who played their (fictional) national game on an assymetrical map where the goals included growing with seasons or non-violence.
The “they will have a turn, then you will always have a turn to react” speed and “everything is visible” aspects of chess really reduce the argument that it’s the ultimate game to simulate life, or combat. Nothing works like that. To the point that the peaceful ambassador in the story was making sure the guards from each faction got to socialise while they were there, because it’s harder to make a situation into black and white enemies when marriages have happened.
I actually love two-player-only games, and they often get criticised for all being too adversarial like chess, but so many of them aren’t! Anyway, thanks, ‘Combinatorial’ nails a lot of the framework that was bugging me 
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