Ludo is a strategy board game for two to four players, in which the players race their four tokens from start to finish according to the rolls of a single die. Like other cross and circle games, Ludo is derived from the Indian game Pachisi. The game and its variations are popular in many countries and under various names.
Shogi, also known as Japanese chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, and janggi. Shōgi means general's board game.
Stratego is a strategy board game for two players on a board of 10×10 squares. Each player controls 40 pieces representing individual officer and soldier ranks in an army. The pieces have Napoleonic insignia. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag or to capture so many enemy pieces that the opponent cannot make any further moves. Stratego has simple enough rules for young children to play but a depth of strategy that is also appealing to adults.
The rules of chess govern the play of the game of chess. Chess is a two-player abstract strategy board game. Each player controls sixteen pieces of six types on a chessboard. Each type of piece moves in a distinct way. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king; checkmate occurs when a king is threatened with capture and has no escape. A game can end in various ways besides checkmate: a player can resign, and there are several ways a game can end in a draw.
Icehouse pieces, or Icehouse Pyramids, Treehouse pieces, Treehouse Pyramids and officially Looney Pyramids, are nestable and stackable pyramid-shaped gaming pieces and a game system. The game system was invented by Andrew Looney and John Cooper in 1987, originally for use in the game of Icehouse.
Zendo is a game of inductive logic designed by Kory Heath in which one player creates a rule for structures ("koans") to follow, and the other players try to discover it by building and studying various koans which follow or break the rule. The first student to correctly state the rule wins.
Martian Chess is an abstract strategy game for two or four players invented by Andrew Looney in 1999. It is played with Icehouse pyramids on a chessboard. To play with a number of players other than two or four, a non-Euclidean surface can be tiled to produce a board of the required size, allowing up to six players.
In tabletop games and video games, game mechanics are the rules or ludemes that govern and guide the player's actions, as well as the game's response to them. A rule is an instruction on how to play, a ludeme is an element of play like the L-shaped move of the knight in chess. A game's mechanics thus effectively specify how the game will work for the people who play it.
A Game of Thrones is a strategy board game created by Christian T. Petersen and published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2003. The game is based on the A Song of Ice and Fire series of high fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. It was followed in 2004 by the expansion A Clash of Kings, and in 2006 by the expansion A Storm of Swords.
Tsuro is a tile-based board game designed by Tom McMurchie, originally published by WizKids and now published by Calliope Games.
Circular chess is a chess variant played using the standard set of pieces on a circular board consisting of four rings, each of sixteen squares. This is topologically equivalent to playing on the curved surface of a cylinder.
Minichess is a family of chess variants played with regular chess pieces and standard rules, but on a smaller board. The motivation for these variants is to make the game simpler and shorter than standard chess. The first chess-like game implemented on a computer was the 6×6 chess variant Los Alamos chess. The low memory capacity of early computers meant that a reduced board size and a smaller number of pieces were required for the game to be implementable on a computer.
A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work or art.
Salta is two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Konrad Heinrich Büttgenbach in 1899 in Germany. Büttgenbach (1870–1939) was born in Heerdt, near Düsseldorf, Germany. The game attained its highest popularity in the early 1900s before World War I especially in France and Germany. The World Trade Fair of 1900 in Paris exhibited a Salta board made of mahogany with golden counters adorned with more than 5,000 diamonds. Famous players were the US chess master Frank Marshall, the German World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker, and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game is a survival horror board game that was first published in 2007. Players can play on the Hero team or as the Zombies. A modular board randomly determines the layout of the town at the start of each game and there are several different scenarios to play. Seven supplements have been released.
RoboRally is a board game for 2–8 players designed by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1994. Various expansions and revisions have been published by both WotC and by Avalon Hill.
The fictional universe of the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett features a number of invented games, some of which have gone on to spawn real-world variants.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
This glossary of board games explains commonly used terms in board games, in alphabetical order. For a list of board games, see List of board games; for terms specific to chess, see Glossary of chess; for terms specific to chess problems, see Glossary of chess problems.
