Abstract Strategy

Torres, winner of the 2000 Spiel des Jahres award, is essentially a game of competitive collaboration in tower-building. Played on an eight-by-eight grid, players place plastic "tower blocks", building both outward and upward.

Acquire is the best-known game by the immortal Sid Sackson, the preeminent American boardgame designer of the mid-20th century. First published in 1962 as part of the 3M line of games, it remained in print when 3M got out of the game business and sold their line to Avalon Hill. Unfortunately, as with most Avalon Hill games, it went out of print when Hasbro took over the company, though they republished a version in 1999, in a huge box with expensive plastic pieces (and changing the hotel theme of the original for an Internet corporation theme, which was somewhat irritating).

The new version reverts to the hotel theme, and also appears to use cardboard counters rather than plastic pieces, which may not be elegant, but means the new version is $24, a very reasonable price these days.

Campaign is ostensibly a game of the 2008 US presidential elections; at start, you're given a choice of three Republican and three Democratic candidates (sorry, George). However, your "candidate" is like your king in Chess; they're all the same. 120 hit points, the same list of potential attacks, and so on. It's one of the pieces you move across the board.

The game is played on a square-gridded version of the continental US (guess Alaska and Hawaii don't count), divided into seven regions. In addition to your candidate, you start with three other units -- the possibilities include Hatchetmen, Spinmeisters, Fundraisers, and Operatives; you get to choose what combination you want.

First published in 1959 by Games Research, and continuously in print since then--now in a handsome edition from the Avalon Hill division of the Wizards of the Coast division of Hasbro--Diplomacy is both a superb game worth experiencing today, and a design of considerable historical importance.

Most boardgames published prior to Diplomacy were multiplayer, but in most cases, players interacted with each other in rather minor ways. As illustration, consider Monopoly; there's very little you can do to hurt or assist another player, even though you are playing in the same universe.

Avalanche is simply the best web-game I've ever played. You know how Diablo took the hack-n-slash mechanic, distilled it, then put it to an endless field of beautiful stochastic patterns, dungeons and bosses and special weapons? Avalanche does the same, in a simpler way, to platforming. You control what appears to be a block of tofu; you can move left and right, you can jump, and most importantly you can hang-slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them, like a tofu ninja (perhaps recalling memories of that secret mode in Resident Evil 2, speed-running with a knife, a sentiment not removed from hardcore play of Avalanche). You've got an endless torrent of blocks, big and small with trivial color variations, coming down from the sky, and an ocean of red liquid rising beneath. Get as high as you can without getting crushed or touching the liquid.

Qwirkle is a remarkable little game: it's a light and simple tile-laying game for two to four players that anyone can learn in minutes, a game that has something of the feel of Scrabble without words. It's the kind of enjoyable and not-apparently-deep game that parents can play it with kids, and grandparents with grandkids. But when dedicated gamers play it head to head, the knives come out.

Good abstract strategy games are very hard to design, because they depend at their core on a small number of easily learned mechanics that breed a high level of strategic complexity--think Chess and Go. Wu Hing is a nicely polished such game--reminiscent of the work of Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph (the finest American boardgame designers of the mid-20th century).

Cosmic Encounter!

Cosmic Encounter! For those of us who encountered the game in our youth, the words have something of the ring of "Oklahoma!" The ebullient American spirit! The vast vistas of, um, outer space. The late nights in dorm rooms or at science fiction conventions studying cards and back-stabbing allies... A brilliant game then, and in its Internet version, a brilliant game still.

So... Battleship Chess. The destroyers move like rooks, right?

Well, no; don't take the name so literally. Like Chess, this is a turn-based abstract strategy game with surprising depth. Like Battleship, its theme is naval combat. But the gameplay is quite unlike those two games.

Each turn, you may move one (and only one) ship in your fleet, which may then fire; if it ends its move adjacent to a friendly ship, both (or all) ships may fire, so planning your moves to maximize your firepower is useful. Different ship types (battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) have different movement ranges, armor ratings--and armaments. As you might expect, battleships have huge long-range guns, while destroyers have shorter-range but potentially devastating torpedoes. Actually, the ship stats are quite detailed, almost as if this were a naval sim, which it patently is not.