Abstract strategy gameAbstract strategy games in contrast to strategy games in general usually have no or minimal narrative theme, outcomes determined only by player choice (with no randomness), and all players have perfect information about the game. For example, Go is a pure abstract strategy game since it fulfills all three criteria; chess and related games are nearly so but feature a recognizable theme of ancient warfare; and Stratego is borderline since it is deterministic, loosely based on 19th-century Napoleonic warfare, and features concealed information.
Connection gameA connection game is a type of abstract strategy game in which players attempt to complete a specific type of connection with their pieces. This could involve forming a path between two or more endpoints, completing a closed loop, or connecting all of one's pieces so they are adjacent to each other. Connection games typically have simple rules, but complex strategies. They have minimal components and may be played as board games, computer games, or even paper-and-pencil games.
DeterminacyDeterminacy is a subfield of set theory, a branch of mathematics, that examines the conditions under which one or the other player of a game has a winning strategy, and the consequences of the existence of such strategies. Alternatively and similarly, "determinacy" is the property of a game whereby such a strategy exists. Determinacy was introduced by Gale and Stewart in 1950, under the name "determinateness". The games studied in set theory are usually Gale–Stewart games—two-player games of perfect information in which the players make an infinite sequence of moves and there are no draws.
Game complexityCombinatorial game theory measures game complexity in several ways: State-space complexity (the number of legal game positions from the initial position), Game tree size (total number of possible games), Decision complexity (number of leaf nodes in the smallest decision tree for initial position), Game-tree complexity (number of leaf nodes in the smallest full-width decision tree for initial position), Computational complexity (asymptotic difficulty of a game as it grows arbitrarily large).
Go (game)Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia. The playing pieces are called stones.
