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Board games with emergent complexity?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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"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!
https://m.youtube.com/c/ThinkerThemer
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..