An abstract strategy game is a strategy game in which the theme is not important to the

experience of playing.[1][2] Many of the world's classic board games, including chess, Go, checkers

and draughts, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese chess), Reversi (marketed as
"Othello"), nine men's morris, and most mancala variants, fit into this category.[3][4] As J. Mark
Thompson wrote in his article "Defining the Abstract", play is sometimes said to resemble a series
of puzzles the players pose to each other:[1]
There is an intimate relationship between such games and puzzles: every board position
presents the player with the puzzle, What is the best move?, which in theory could be solved by
logic alone. A good abstract game can therefore be thought of as a "family" of potentially
interesting logic puzzles, and the play consists of each player posing such a puzzle to the other.
Good players are the ones who find the most difficult puzzles to present to their opponents.
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.
Combinatorial games have no randomizers such as dice, no simultaneous movement, nor hidden
information. Some games that do have these elements are sometimes classified as abstract
strategy games. (Games such as Continuo, Octiles, Can't Stop, and Sequence, could be
considered abstract strategy games, despite having a luck or bluffing element.) A smaller
category of abstract strategy games manages to incorporate hidden information without using
any random elements; the best known example is Stratego.
Traditional abstract strategy games are often treated as a separate game category, hence the
term 'abstract games' is often used for competitions that exclude them and can be thought of as
referring to modern abstract strategy games. Two examples are the IAGO World Tour (2007–
2010) and the Abstract Games World Championship held annually since 2008 as part of the Mind
Sports Olympiad.[5]
Some abstract strategy games have multiple starting positions of which it is required that one be
randomly determined. For a game to be one of skill, a starting position needs to be chosen by
impartial means. Some games, such as Arimaa and DVONN, have the players build the starting
position in a separate initial phase which itself conforms strictly to combinatorial game principles.
Most players, however, would consider that although one is then starting each game from a
different position, the game itself contains no luck element. Indeed, Bobby
Fischer promoted randomization of the starting position in chess in order to increase player
dependence on thinking at the board.[6]