by Nicholas Bamber
Now I have a big spreadsheet with over 800 abstract boardgames playable from your browser, I thought it would be fun to drill into it a bit.A Golden Age?Let's start with the year of publication. Viewed from the lens of the spreadsheet, the number of games published per year has generally increased starting in maybe the Eighties.
Most Implemented GamesIf a lot more games are being invented nowadays, it is the old classics that are generally being implemented.
Position Game Implementations
1st Chess 17
2nd Xiangqi 14
3rd Go 13
=4th Chess960 12
=4th Othello 12
=4th Shogi 12
=7th Backgammon 10
=7th Checkers 10
=7th Hex 10
=7th International Checkers 10
About three quarters of the Abstract Atlas games have only
one implementation.
Biggest Game FamiliesIn the spreadsheet I combine the
Game:...,
Series:... and
Traditional Games:... into a single column called
Game Family because they operate at roughly the same level. I am not sure if this is a good idea, but I quite like it. Anyway it drives home the message that
Traditional Games: Chess and other Traditional Games families dominate. The others seem to be some publisher or designer trying to develop a brand.
Position Game Family Count
1st Chess 85
2nd Checkers / Draughts 28
3rd Shogi 16
4th Mancala 15
5th Go 11
6th GIPF Project 9
=7th Tafl 8
=7th Classic (Gigamic) 8
9th Shibumi 7
=10th GoPlay 5
=10th Dominoes 5
=10th The Reliquary Collection (Bibelot Games) 5
The most interesting of the latter to me,
The Reliquary Collection (Bibelot Games), puts a brand on some ancient games:
Popular MechanicsAnd what do the most listed Mechanics tell us about the state of the Abstract games hobby?
Position Mechanics Count
1st Grid Movement 291
2nd Square Grid 264
3rd Pattern Building 215
4th Tile Placement 199
5th Hexagon Grid 104
6th Area Majority / Influence 96
7th Enclosure 86
8th Pattern Recognition 84
9th Chaining 65
10th Connections 64
There is a little surprise in this list. In paricular
Grid Movement,
Square Grid are the cornerstone of the vast majority of games.
Hexagon Grid and
Connections seem very much associated with modern abstracts to me.
Maybe the abstract game designers could use the unused mechanics as an inspiration? Over 60 mechanics are not in the full list and I can see why abstract game designers don't rush to use
Singing or
Auction: Dexterity. But what about
Voting? Obviously
Visual Restriction is incompatible with the combinatorial restriction, but it seems fine for the more general class of abstract games. Could someone devise an abstract
Roles with Asymmetric Information game, without it just being a Social Deduction game?
The PlatformsWe might as well just list all of them. Obviously this is abstracts only and the ordering would be different otherwise, though BGA would be much further out in front. Also I have noticed that occasionally BGA-style games are being removed from
Abstract Strategy, which might reduce the BGA number further.
Platform Abstracts Only Here Microbadge
Board Game Arena 291 217 Board Game Arena - 2025 logo
Abstract Play 269 167
igGameCenter 146 58
BoardSpace 104 40 BoardSpace.net user
MindSports 95 40
GoldToken 56 9
Yucata 42 20 Yucata.de player
Chessvariants.com 41 23
Little Golem 34 2
Play Abstract Games 34 5
Pychess 30 10
PlayStrategy 28 1
Bodogemu 18 10
GrandGamesArena 17 1
PlayOK 14 0
Greenchess 11 4
Triqqy 11 1 Triqqy player
81dojo 6 0
Chess.com 6 0
AbstractBoardGames 5 0
Lichess 5 0
Lishogi 5 0
Lidraughts 4 0
Chess.org 2 0
The
Only Here column gives the number of abstract games only implemented on that platform. We really need more of these websites to set-up microbadges, so that this blogpost looks prettier.
I am curious about the perhaps one-sided rivalry between the two leaders. These are the 38 implemented on
both AbstractPlay and BGA:
What's up with Neoprene?Now let's consider those families that begin with "Components:".
Position Components Count
1st 8 x 8 Grids 72
2nd Wooden pieces & boards 67
3rd Neoprene Mat 49
4th 5 x 5 Grids 45
5th 9 x 9 Grids 40
6th HexHex5 Grids 37
7th 7 x 7 Grids 35
8th 3-Dimensional (3D) 33
=9th 10 x 10 Grids 32
=9th 6 x 6 Grids 32
The 8x8 Grids (and to a lesser extent 10x10) and Wooden pieces and boards obviously do not surprise me as these are a staple of
Chess and
Draughts. HexHex5 boards also seem very popular designers such as Nick Bentley. Neoprene mats are not a surprise because I have been watching them slide into my CSV over the course of the Cache Expiry Storm (described below). And the component was only added to the BGG database in June this year. But what is going on there? The Neoprene mats seem to be a description referring to the format produced by the publisher of these games, Nestor Games. But why is this tag being added now when Nestor Games is shuttered?
The Most Prolific DesignerObviously the most
prolific designer is not necessarily the best designer. I could cough up a new chess variant every day for a hundred years, and it would not make me the best designer. And I am not going to hand out any awards, but let's have some fun.
Position Designer Count
1st Mark Steere 45
2nd Christian Freeling 40
3rd Luis Bolaños Mures 25
4th Dieter Stein 16
5th João Pedro Neto 12
6th Nick Bentley 11
7th Néstor Romeral Andrés 9
7th James Ernest 9
7th Alek Erickson 9
7th Cameron Browne 9
7th Kris Burm 9
7th Corey Clark 9
Firstly I wondered if
Mark Steere's position at the top is biased by the fact that on
BGA he implements his own games. If we exclude those 16 implementations and also the 27 implementations of
Christian Freeling games on
MindSports, then Mark Steere is still at the top, but Christian Freeling drops a rung.
At the other end of the scale, 80% of the designers in the Abstract Atlas have only got one game in the spreadsheet, and another 10% have got two.
Abstract Atlas UpdateThe project of reconciling the Abstract Atlas with the platform websites is entering a new phase, in that I have done all those that are
easy. More may follow later. Those that are currently reconciled are:
I want to make the reconciliation process something that I run just once a month. So I added an option to do all the reconciliations in one go. Furthermore the reconciliation process usues one page from the relevant website. So this option now also deletes that cache key to ensure that side of the reconciliation is uptodate.
Bodogemu recently added
Zyrcan and
Jungle / Dou Shou Qi. Also
igGameCenter added
Catena,
Jumpers and
Clamber. I finished reconciling
PlayOK and found that it also supports
Italian Checkers and
International Checkers.
PlayStrategy added
Hyle 7 under the name
Entropy.
Yucata added
Chess Joker.
I really appreciate the interest shown in my recent
Mancala post. It is very on my agenda to look a bit more deeply into checking the mechanics of the games discussed there.
StormsI have recently been through a cache expiry storm.
To explain, the code for the
Abstract Atlas currently caches about 14,000 boardgames with a 6 month expiry and a "variance" of 0.5. I was not really sure what 0.5 meant but I understood and hoped it would lead to them slowly expiring leading to cache evenly spread over the year. However the Atlas only has about 800 games in it, and I think it needs to cache another 1,000 or so which are pulled in from the Digital Implementations families and rejected for not being
Abstracts. The other 10,000+ were from boot strapping platforms with an early iteration of the code, most likely
chessvariants.com. The latter group will eventually disappear leaving my cache much leaner.
Before the storm it was quite rare for the script to register any changes at all. During the storm the cache entries started randomly expiring as they are supposed to. However instead of getting a handful changing every day as I hoped it was more like 30 everytime I ran any script that looked at the cache. So the storm took the 2000 important cache entries from being concentrated in 2 days to being spread over 2 weeks. This is really not what I was hoping for.
I had been checking changes just using the standard Linux
diff command. What I wanted to know was: Have any columns been added or removed; Have any rows been added or removed; Have any important fields changed; Maybe only then have any volatile fields changed such as number of ratings. Just to cope with the volume of changes I was seeing I wrote a custom script that does just this.
Now that the stop has passed, I have added an option to expire the cache of a certain number of boardgames. The idea is that once a day 5 randomly selected boardgames will get uptodate data. This should smooth the cache out across the year.
Meanwhile, when I was writing this, my Dad and Brother had to leave a remote Scottish island a day early to avoid being stranded there by a pending storm.
This was our second year at Kingdom-Con hosting the Game Crafter table. And just like last year it was a great experience. The convention may be small when compared with something like Gen-Con, but it bustles with energy and people playing games late into the night. I know I was up way past my normal bedtime.
Talk about being Johnny-on-the-spot! But all was well, since we had our secret weapon all setup and ready to go! Having a computer with internet access setup made answering his questions easy. I just pulled up the website and we went over his questions one by one. Especially that really hard question, "how much will it cost?"
Of course, while working the table we played our own card game Virgins. We also got in a few hands of our new expansion decks. The plan for the expansion decks is to have separate three player decks that can combine with either the original Virgins deck or each other. This allows more players and lets us introduce some fun new rules. Speaking of rules, we printed our rules on stiff cardstock and that made them a lot easier to work with for demos.
Alongside our old friends we got to meet lots of new people and let them now about Game Crafters. One vendor we spoke too thought that getting custom tuck boxes made in order to build mini-decks to send out to reviewers would be a good idea. Much more presentable than just a loose stack in a plastic baggy. It's all about the presentation.