Abstract Board Games Bucket List

Achieve competitive chess rating

Jump opponent's pieces in this ancient game

Match tiles in this traditional Chinese game

Race to bear off all your checkers first

Master the ancient Chinese abstract strategy game

Race your pieces across the star board

Flip discs to your color in this abstract game

Chess-like bug tactics played with no board (2001).

Build castles upward and score by the level your knight stands on.

Japanese chess, where captured pieces change sides and come back.

Chess with a shuffled back rank, so the opening book is useless.

A mill game carved into cathedral cloisters and Roman roof tiles.

Colours and shapes on wooden tiles; Scrabble without the words.

Seat the guests so the nationalities work out; a tile game about a crowded bar.

Stack blocks into skyscrapers and take over the ones already built.

Stack your pieces on top of your opponent's in an abstract Sid Sackson designed in 1963.

A river, cannons that jump to capture, and generals who may never meet.

Move stones up five tracks, each of which you can only ever go one way along.

The palace garden on hexes, where a tile has to share a colour or a plant with its neighbour.

The same drafting moved into a chocolate shop, scoring boxes filled by colour and by shape.

Two players decorating the vaults of the palace, one by day and one by night.

Trees cast shadows over each other as the sun rotates around the board.

Panes instead of tiles, and a glazier who only ever moves clockwise around the factories.

The one real expansion: double-sided boards and a plastic overlay that lets you choose where the pattern goes.

The best of the Azul family, with wild tiles and a gentler penalty for what you cannot place.