Abalone.

Abalone is an abstract two-player game from 1987 that looks a bit like Chinese checkers but plays with much more complexity thanks to a short list of very narrowly defined potential moves. It got a digital release late in 2017 from Asmodee Digital that offers a variety of starting boards and has a mostly superb interface, although they might need a harder AI player for a future update. It’s available on iTunes and Google Play for $2.99.

Abalone is played on the central, shared area of a Chinese checkers board, a hexagon with nine rows ranging from five spaces on the exterior to nine spaces in the center row. Each player begins with 14 marbles, black or white, and must try to push six of the opposing player’s marbles off the board to win. The potential moves are:

1. You can move one marble one space in any direction, as long as the space is empty.
2. You can move two or three marbles in a line forward, as a unit, one space. If the next space has an opposing marble in it, but your group has more marbles than there are opposing marbles in the same row, then you can push them one space backwards. So you can move two marbles, one behind the other, to push a solitary opposing marble into an empty space beyond it, and you can move three marbles in a line to push two opposing marbles.
3. You can move two or three adjacent marbles on the perpendicular, rather than moving them in a line (moving them like you’re sweeping them with your hand), but can’t push any opposing marbles that way.

The game requires players to consider offense and defense; setting traps is a huge part of Abalone, and avoiding them by setting up lines of three marbles when you can is just as important, but with 14 marbles (a number that will decline as the game progresses), that’s not easy to do. You have to watch the edges to make sure you don’t lose sight of a marble that’s in danger of being pushed off the board on the next turn.

The easy AI player is really just a tutorial/newbie opponent, while the hard player is good but I think a bit too beatable. The hardest AI will take advantage of pieces on the edge, but its trap-setting capabilities are a little weak, and I have seen it fail to take the occasional risk-free ejection. (Sometimes you can eject an opponent’s marble, but doing so always puts your marble in the vacated space, and thus you might be giving your opponent an easy push.) I’ve lost to the hard AI player, but I beat it more often than I lose, needing as few as 63 moves to win and as many as 199.

The nicest starting arrangement in Abalone.

The app comes with more than 30 starting boards; some players think the official, classic board is “solved,” or at least confers too much of an advantage to the start player, although given the sheer number of moves required, the game being “solved” would still require you to memorize a ridiculous number of steps. There’s also a chance of a stalemate, especially with the AI players, where both players end up repeating a loop of steps indefinitely, until one player chooses to make a more aggressive move instead. I do think the various “Daisy” boards – the app includes four – present a better challenge, reducing the chances of a temporary stalemate, and as I quickly learned, they also give the start player a great opportunity to do something very stupid at the beginning.

I’ve never been a huge fan of chess, because the game requires more study and more forward planning than I like in a game – it’s a serious intellectual challenge, but begins to feel more like work, and mapping out the potential scenarios creates a fairly large decision tree in my head. (I’m also not great at discarding moves – I think the best chess players can prune those trees because they know their opponents will make a specific move in response to each of their own moves.) Abalone has that chess-lite feel that I love in games – yes, there are lots of potential moves, but the tree is limited because you only have one piece type, and it’s definitely easier to figure out your opponent’s likely next move.

I won this game rather nicely.

The app is very easy to play even on the small screen, and lets you undo any move before confirming it. You can also see the last move with a rewind feature that’s very useful, and at game end it tells you how many moves the game took and replays the entire thing from the beginning. One minor quibble is that when you leave the app for a while, resuming a game requires you to enter the menu to start a new game and then hit the Pause button in the upper right, the only thing in the app that felt non-intuitive. The tutorial is also excellent.

Abalone was briefly on sale for 99 cents, and I imagine it will be again at some point; I’ve found it quite addictive even as I’ve gotten to be good enough to beat the AI more than half the time (which I interpret as a weak AI, not that I’m some skilled player). It offers a pass and play mode as well as networked play, which might be the better option if you’re looking for a more serious challenge instead of a minor brain teaser. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from it already.