Some games are complicated - they have really complex rules. Examples of this are games where you have to track many different types of tokens, with different rules for each.
Other games have really simple rules, but still manage to produce extreme complexity in they way they are played.
Go is the perfect example of this. It literally has 2-3 rules, but because you can play anywhere, the complexity it can produce is wide and deep, to the point that tomes have been written on how to play it.
What other boardgames exist that have very simple rules, but produce complex and interesting game play?
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I’ll throw in an answer from a different angle: social deduction games can be incredibly rules-light while still maintaining a lot of complexity. Resistance, for example, has not too many more rules than Go, but games can get deeply complex as players try to figure out who the spies are.
The big difference is of course that the complexity offered by something like Resistance is the product of imperfect information and willful deception, which means that a good ability to read people (or conversely, to lie) can be at least as important as strategic mastery.
Yeah, that’s totally true. I guess there the complexity mostly comes more from the preexisting complexity of people.
I don’t know if Pente is being published by anyone any longer, but it’s a similar modern game that had its moment back in the 70s and early 80s. The board and pieces would be trivial to reproduce.
It’s a lot of fun with surprisingly complex strategies arising from very simple rules.
Interesting. I have a Go board, so maybe I’ll give it a go…
Looks vaguely similar to Reversi
Tokaido is kinda like that. It’s not hugely deeply complex or anything, but it has two simple rules that together create really emergent gameplay. 1) On your turn, you can move however far foward you like and 2) Whoever is in the rear most position on the board takes the next turn.
*Tokaido (in case OP or someone else wants to look it up.)
I played it a few times at a friend’s house and really enjoyed it. Never won a match, but that’s not the point - the entire game is about travelers making the most out of their trip throughout Japan. For this reason, the game feels very chill, despite being competitive.
It’s not my favourite board game ever, but it was a nice change of pace for a while. I think it does get a bit stale after a while, though.
Blokus sort of slowly blossoms and then gradually squeezes. That’s still nothing compared to Go, haha.
True, I agree it has a similar feel, even if quite a bit simpler. I only played it once, when I couch surfed with some Mormons in Utah. Pretty fun.
You are asking about abstracts, check out Reiner Knizia’s career output.
Also
What do you mean by “abstracts”?
Hive and Tak are are high on that list, and absolutely match what I mean…
Tak is fucking amazing for what it is, and I love that (unlike go) it seems to have this property of unpredictableness (despite the perfect information aspect), which means that even though I’ve played maybe a hundred games, a newish player can beat me quite often, just because I missed one possible path. I also love the story behind it.
I’d be suuuper keen on something like that that is good for 3-6 players.
“Abstract” is a board gaming term meant to describe board games that are designed purely for the abstract joy of the game, the theming is light and the rules are as minimal as possible to get out of the way of the interesting strategic implications. What matters is the intriguing mechanics and thus the game appears “abstract” compared to a more heavily themed board game that has lots of rules to help bring to life a particular vision or theme.
Chess, go and backgammon are only some examples of classic abstracts, but there is a vibrant scene of modern board game designers creating similar games.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_strategy_game
Of course, there is a beautiful continuum, this isn’t a binary categorization.
As a side note, one of the board game youtube channels I most highly respect is an australian couple called Thinker Themer where one of them loves board games for Theme and one loves them for Mechanics (someone more like you) and they try to find games that hit all the right boxes for both of them. Even if you are purely a player that plays for mechanics I think it is an interesting perspective on this subject!
I think I agree that abstracts more often have this property, but I don’t think there is a perfect correlation…
Chess is an interesting example, to me it’s rule complexity is kinda medium-high. It definitely does have emergent complexity, and though I have a vast respect for it as a game, it just kind of bores me, and I think its because the ratio of emergent complexity to rule complexity is low… I dunno, maybe I’m just being a brat…
Backgammon and checkers are even less interesting, for the same reasons.
An interesting kinda-counter example is Regicide… If you play the full game, it’s 100% themed, and you can feel that even when you play with a normal deck of cards. But it does seem to have some interesting emergent-feeling property. Even though it’s really just a slightly more complex multiplayer solitaire…
I mean yes and no, you are just saying what lots of fans of abstracts claim makes them superior to other types of games… to which the rest of the board gaming community smiles bemusedly and goes on playing whatever type of game they find the most intriguing which may or may not be an abstract (it probably isn’t).
Yes and no to which part? I’m not trying to claim abstracts are good…
I think that regicide is NOT abstract (not sure though), but still seems to have the property that I like…
I wouldn’t necessarily describe blood bowl as simple, but it definitely has emergent complexity. The core rules of movement and blocking are straightforward once you wrap your head around them, but layering on team asymmetry, skills, probability, and the game state can lead to some seriously crunchy tactics.
Thank you. I think my sportsballphobia might get in the way a bit. Are the rules really that simple? It looks on the order of warhammer or MTG?
It’s a Warhammer game, based on American football. They’ve made video game versions of it going back to the mid-90’s as well.
It’s a turn-based strategy game, not particularly simple, but easy to learn.
I’m not a sportsy person but the minis won me over with their silly charm.
The very core of it is moving, blocking (fighting), and ball handling (usually just roll a d6 against your agility start, less modifiers). Players exert a zone of control (“tackle zones”) in adjacent squares which apply agility penalties and provide assists in blocks. Grocking the assist rule and its implications is the hardest part of learning the game, but it’s not actually complicated. Using all of that together for good positioning has a skill ceiling akin to chess, with risk management layered on top.
More complexity is added when you factor in the various teams and skills that can be developed, but 1) you can and should just learn those as you encounter them, and 2) the complexity:depth ratio there is very favourable imo.
I’ve never played Warhammer but as I understand it,
it’sBlood Bowl is quite a bit simpler. MTG is probably a fair comparison, but it’s a bit apples to oranges.In board game terms, I’d say a learning game of 7s (the smaller and sillier quick play variant) is low-mid complexity, and full scale league games with all the bells and whistles while being a tryhard about it is less complex than say, Spirit Island at its peak.
It’s also quite telling that you can play it fast and loose as a beer and pretzels game more about “haha silly sports man tripped from running too fast and died” if you don’t want a brain burner.
edit: clarity
Cool, that does sound kind of fun. I’ll keep an eye out
Np. Lemmy doesn’t have an active blood bowl community, so feel free to message me with any questions about getting started!
Risk 2210. There’s 5 turns. It takes 3-ish hours.
What produces the complexity?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5/acquire
Acquire! Check that game ID! It was the 5th (or 6th) game added to the bgg database. Great game. Easy to learn, tough to master. I play online every Wednesday with my dad and other friends.
You might find this project interesting: https://ludii.games/
There are some papers related to complexity. https://ludii.games/references.php
And I believe the game engine contains some mechanism to quantify complexity of different game systems.
Oh, that is cool!
Has anyone tried ranking well known games with those quantifications?
I recall that the client display some complexity number for every game you play. Unfortunately, I don’t have computer access ATM so I’m not able to run the Java app (it’s probably doable on Android, but meh…). I believe most of the worlds abstract strategy games are in the database/library, so you can just check them out.
I also found this: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/284017/estimating-abstract-game-complexity-using-ludii
Cool. Those results (especially Go and Backgammon) make me think that what I’m looking for is mostly related to the branching factor…
Would be interesting to find some non-abstract games with a large branching factor…
It might also be interesting to plot complexity/branching over time. Since you mention emergent complexity. Also, one might want to do some intelligent filtering or compression when it comes to branching so that it doesn’t account for too irrelevant moves.
