Chess, Go, and the Deep Roots of Strategy Games
Modern board games move fast — new mechanics, new themes, a fresh wave of Kickstarter-funded titles every year. It's easy to forget that two of the oldest strategy games ever devised, chess and Go, are both still played competitively today, centuries or millennia after they were first codified, and that a surprising amount of what makes modern strategy games work traces straight back to principles those two games worked out first.
Chess: complete information, asymmetric openings, deep theory
Chess belongs to a category game theorists call a game of “perfect information” — both players can see the entire board at all times, with no hidden cards, no dice, and no concealed information of any kind. Every outcome, in principle, is determined entirely by the decisions both players make. That single design choice is why chess supports such staggeringly deep theory: centuries of recorded games, opening databases, and named strategies (the Sicilian Defense, the Queen's Gambit) all exist because nothing about the game is left to chance for players to blame instead.
What's easy to miss is how much of that depth comes from asymmetric piece movement rather than a big board or a large rulebook. Six piece types, each moving differently, create a genuinely enormous space of possible positions — more possible chess games exist than atoms in the observable universe, by most estimates — from a rule set that fits on a single page. Modern strategy games that pack deep decision-making into a short rules explanation are, whether or not their designers intended it, chasing the same effect.
Go: simple rules, emergent complexity
Go takes a different route to similar depth. Where chess achieves complexity through varied piece movement, Go uses one single rule — place a stone, try to surround territory and opposing stones — on a much larger board (traditionally 19×19 lines), and lets complexity emerge from how that one rule interacts with itself at scale. For decades, Go was considered the harder game for computers to master precisely because its complexity doesn't come from complicated individual rules that a program can encode directly; it comes from the sheer scale of interactions between simple pieces spread across a big board.
This is a genuinely different design lesson from chess's, and one modern abstract and area-control games borrow constantly: you don't need a rulebook full of exceptions to get real strategic depth. A small number of simple, well-chosen rules, given enough room to interact, can generate more complexity than a long list of special cases.
What both games share: no hidden information, no luck
Chess and Go sit at the same end of one important spectrum: both are fully deterministic, perfect-information games with no dice, no cards, and no fog of war. That's actually unusual among popular tabletop games today, where hidden hands, dice rolls, and concealed objectives are the norm. It's worth remembering that "no luck at all" is a legitimate, historically dominant design choice, not a gap modern games are trying to fill — it just optimizes for a different kind of tension, where every loss is attributable entirely to a decision you made rather than a bad die roll.
The race games that came even earlier
Chess and Go aren't even the oldest strategy games still recognizably played today — backgammon and its ancient predecessor Senet push the timeline back further still, into different territory: games that combine a race toward a goal with real strategic decisions about which pieces to move, layered on top of dice-driven randomness. That combination — genuine strategy sitting on top of real luck — is arguably the more common template for the games most people actually own today, from party games to competitive Euro games, than the pure-skill lineage of chess and Go.
Why the history is worth knowing
None of this is trivia for its own sake. Recognizing which design lineage a modern game descends from — deterministic and skill-pure like chess and Go, or strategy layered over managed randomness like backgammon — tells you a lot about what kind of experience to expect before you've read a single rule. Our Museum of Games traces both of these lineages in more depth, from the earliest known race games through the deep opening theory of chess and the emergent complexity of Go, right up to the modern Euro games that borrow from all of them at once.