Chess
Western chess, international chess
Six pieces, one king, and fifteen hundred years of people trying to work it out. Learn the rules in ten minutes, then spend a lifetime on the rest.
Blinky Games
Board game guides: rules, history and strategy
Every game here gets four pages — a complete guide, the rules, the history that produced them, and the strategy that wins. Written to be read once and used forever, with diagrams for the parts that words alone never quite explain.
29 Games116 GuidesFree, no sign-up
The chess family
One Indian ancestor, four very different games — and the animal game built for children.
Xiangqi
象棋 Xiàngqí
Cannons that capture by jumping, a river across the middle, and generals who may never leave their palace. Chinese chess is sharper than the game it shares an ancestor with.
Shogi
将棋 Shōgi
Captured pieces change sides and come back. That one rule makes shogi the sharpest member of the chess family, with almost no draws and no safe simplification.
Jungle Chess
鬥獸棋 Dòu Shòu Qí
Elephant beats lion and lion beats tiger — but the rat topples the elephant. Eight ranked animals, two rivers and three traps in front of each den.
Asian classics
Games with centuries of play behind them, from the Go board to the Javanese sowing row.
Go
圍棋 Wéiqí · 囲碁 Igo · 바둑 Baduk
The oldest board game still played with its original rules, and arguably the deepest. Five rules, no exceptions, and more possible positions than atoms in the universe.
Gomoku
五目並べ Gomoku · 連珠 Renju
Five stones in a line on a Go board. Simple enough for a child, and so favourable to the first player that two separate rule systems exist to fix it.
Surakarta
Roundabouts
Two rules and one extraordinary idea: pieces capture by racing around the board's corner loops — a mechanism found in no other traditional board game.
Congkak
congkak · congklak · dakon
Scoop the seeds, sow them one by one, and chain your free turns. The Malay world's branch of mancala, and a game of pure arithmetic.
Conquer
Kepung Titik
Squared paper, two colours, and one idea: ring your rival's dots and the territory is yours. Known as Точки in Russia and Kropki in Poland.
Western classics
The board games of the European and American living room — and the oldest board game we can still play.
Checkers
Draughts, English draughts
Diagonal moves, compulsory jumps and crowned kings. Simple enough for a child, and deep enough that proving it a draw took eighteen years of computation.
Backgammon
Tables, tavli, nard
A 5,000-year-old race where every roll is luck and every choice is skill — and the doubling cube turns the whole thing into a question of nerve.
Reversi
Othello
A minute to learn, a lifetime to master. Outflank to flip — and discover that having more discs in the middlegame usually means you are losing.
Nine Men's Morris
Mills, Merels, Mühle, Nine Man Morris
Place nine men, line three in a row, and take an enemy man each time you do. A game carved into Roman stone, Viking ships and cathedral cloisters.
Royal Game of Ur
Twenty Squares, the Game of Twenty Squares
Buried in a Mesopotamian royal tomb 4,500 years ago, dug up with no instructions, and brought back to life by a cuneiform tablet. It is also a genuinely good game.
Ludo
Parcheesi, Parchís, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, Pachisi
Roll a six to start, race four tokens round the cross, and send your rivals all the way back. The most played race game in the world.
Chinese Checkers
Sternhalma
Hop your marbles across a six-pointed star. Neither Chinese nor checkers — a German star board for an American game, renamed in New York in 1928.
Dots and Boxes
La Pipopipette, Squares, Paddocks
A children's doodle invented by a French mathematician in 1889 — with a rigorous theory of chains, loops and sacrifices that most players never suspect exists.
Card games
Trick-taking, melding, shedding and the one you play alone.
Bridge
Contract Bridge
An auction, a contract and thirteen tricks to prove it. The deepest card game there is, and the bidding is a language you can spend a lifetime learning.
Hearts
Black Maria, Black Lady
Every heart costs a point and the queen of spades costs thirteen. A trick-taking game where winning tricks is the last thing you want — unless you take all of them.
Gin Rummy
Gin
Ten cards, two piles and one decision every hand: cash a small win now, or hold out for gin and risk the undercut.
Big Two
鋤大弟 · 大老二
Thirteen cards each, the 2 above the ace, and poker hands played as single units. Shed everything before the other three do.
Solitaire
Klondike, Patience
The game that taught the world to drag and drop — and a card puzzle where the deal matters more than anything, but careful play still decides most winnable hands.
Modern games and puzzles
Twentieth-century designs with rules you can learn in a minute and spend years sharpening.
Stratego
L'Attaque
Forty pieces, all face down. A French battle game patented by a woman in 1908, and one of the last classic games artificial intelligence managed to crack.
Battleship
Sea Battle, Salvo
Hide a fleet, call your shots, and learn how much better a good search is than a lucky one — about fifty shots a game.
Connect Four
Four in a Row, Captain's Mistress
Drop a disc, make four in a row. Solved twice in the same month of 1988 — and the first player wins, but only from the centre.
Sudoku
数独 Sūdoku
One rule stated three ways, no arithmetic, and no guessing ever required. Invented in 1979 by an American architect nobody credited.
Crossword
Crossword puzzle, cryptic crossword
A grid, some numbers, and clues that cross. Invented to fill space in a newspaper in 1913 and still the most played word puzzle in the world.
Minesweeper
Mine Sweeper
Every number is a constraint. Flags are optional, deduction is not — and the puzzle is formally as hard as any problem in NP.
Tilt Maze
Labyrinth, marble maze, ball maze
Tip the board and let gravity do the moving. The hard part is not finding the route — it is stopping.