Chess doesn’t have a sequel, but it does have cousins. If you’ve worn out your board and you’re wondering what else scratches the same itch, “strategy game” isn’t specific enough. Half of what gets called strategy these days involves dice, cards, or a hand of secret information you’re managing along with your plan. That’s not what chess players are usually asking for.
We’re defining “like chess” narrowly here: pure abstract strategy games, mostly two-player, where both sides see the entire game state and the outcome comes down to who reads the position better. No luck. No hidden hands. No theme doing the heavy lifting, just a board, some pieces, and a fight. That rules out plenty of excellent games. It also means Chinese Checkers only just clears the bar, and we say so below.
We went looking at what the abstract strategy crowd on BoardGameGeek and the wider board game community actually recommends when someone asks this question, not just what happens to be sitting on our shelf. A few of these we own. Most of them are games we’d tell a chess player to go find, even though nobody in our group has played them yet. Worth saying up front, because the honest answer to “what’s like chess” pulls from a smaller, weirder pond than our usual review list.
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Part of our complete guide to the Best Board Games, where this category fits in the wider hobby.
Best Board Games Like Chess Comparison Table
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| Image | Game | Players | Time | Price | Our Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Onitama | 2 | 15-20 min | $$ | — |
 | Hive | 2 | 20-30 min | $$$ | — |
 | Go | 2 | 30-60 min | $$ | — |
 | Santorini | 2-4 | 20-30 min | $$$ | — |
 | Quoridor | 2-4 | 15-20 min | $$ | — |
 | YINSH | 2 | 30-60 min | $$$ | — |
 | Abalone | 2 | 30 min | $$ | — |
 | The Duke | 2 | 20-30 min | $$ | — |
 | Chinese Checkers | 2-6 | 30-60 min | $ | — |
1. Onitama
If we had to name the single closest thing to chess that isn’t chess, it’s this. Onitama is played on a 5x5 grid, each player has a Master piece and four Students, and the win condition is exactly what a chess player expects: capture the enemy Master, or walk your own Master into their starting square. That second option is new to most chess players and it changes how you think about defense from the first game.
The twist is the deck of movement cards. Every piece on the board moves according to one of five cards in play at any moment, and after you use a card, it passes to your opponent and a new one rotates in from a shared pool. You’re not just planning your next move. You’re planning around what moves your opponent is about to gain access to, because you handed some of them to them yourself. It’s a small rule that produces a surprising amount of depth.
Games run 15 to 20 minutes, which is a real selling point if you’ve ever sat down for a chess game that ran long past when you meant to stop. The components are minimal: a folding board, some wooden pieces, a stack of cards. It travels well and sets up in under a minute.
The learning curve is gentle for the first game and then opens up fast. New players usually grasp the rules in five minutes and lose badly to anyone who’s played a dozen games, which is exactly the kind of skill ceiling chess players are looking for. This is the game we’d point a chess player toward first if they only try one thing on this list.
2. Hive (Full Review Here)
Hive throws out the board entirely, which sounds like it should make the game less like chess, not more. In practice it does the opposite. Every piece is an insect with its own movement rule. The Queen Bee shuffles one hex at a time, the Spider moves exactly three, the Beetle can climb on top of the hive and pin pieces underneath it. The objective is the same as chess in spirit: surround your opponent’s Queen Bee on all six sides before they surround yours.
Because the hive of tiles grows and reshapes itself every turn, there’s no fixed geometry to memorize the way there is with a chessboard. You’re reading a living shape instead of a grid, and that shape can look completely different from one game to the next depending on where pieces get played.
We’ve reviewed Hive in full elsewhere on the site and it holds up on repeat plays better than almost anything else we own in this category. The tile quality is good, the box is small enough to throw in a bag, and Hive Pocket versions exist if portability matters to you more than table presence.
The one honest caveat: the opening few turns can feel directionless until you’ve internalized how the Beetle and Spider interact with a growing hive. Play through that stretch a couple of times and it clicks hard.
3. Go
Go is older than chess by a wide margin and arguably harder to master, so leaving it off a list like this would be dishonest. Two players alternate placing black and white stones on the intersections of a grid, trying to surround more territory than their opponent. That’s the entire rule set. There’s no piece hierarchy, no special moves, nothing to memorize before you can start playing.
What makes Go relevant here isn’t the rules, it’s the type of thinking it demands. Chess rewards calculating specific move sequences several turns deep. Go rewards something closer to intuition about shape and territory that even strong computer engines struggled to replicate for decades longer than they struggled with chess. If you like chess because of the pure information, no-luck nature of it rather than the specific piece movements, Go might actually be the deeper well.
The standard board is 19x19, which intimidates newcomers, but 9x9 and 13x13 boards exist and are the normal way to learn. A 9x9 game plays in well under an hour and teaches the core capturing and territory concepts without the sprawl of the full board.
Go sets range from cheap plastic-stone travel kits to genuinely beautiful bowl-and-stone sets that cost as much as a nice chess set. Start cheap. This is a game you either fall for completely or don’t, and there’s no reason to spend on a nice board before you know which one you are.
4. Santorini
Santorini keeps the two-worker, race-to-a-goal shape of a lot of abstract games, but it adds a dimension chess doesn’t have: height. Players move one of two workers each turn, then build a level onto an adjacent space. Win by getting a worker onto a third-story building. The board changes shape as you play, literally rising in front of you, which nothing about a flat chessboard prepares you for.
The tension is that every build helps somebody. You can’t add height to the board without either boosting your own path to the top or handing your opponent a stepping stone, and reading which is more true at any given moment is the whole game.
There’s an optional layer of god powers, cards that grant each player a unique special ability, which pushes the game away from pure abstract territory and toward something closer to a light strategy game with asymmetric factions. We’d tell a chess purist to play the base game without powers first. It’s a clean, complete abstract on its own, and the powers are a fun variant once you’ve got the fundamentals down, not a required add-on.
Component quality is a genuine strength here. The 3D towers look good on a table and the game plays 2 to 4, which is unusual for this list and worth knowing if your group is bigger than a pair.
5. Quoridor
Quoridor is the game we’d hand to someone who says chess takes too long to teach. The rule fits in one sentence: on your turn, either move your pawn one square, or place a wall to slow your opponent down. Get your pawn to the opposite side of the board before they get theirs to yours.
That one sentence hides real depth. Walls can’t fully seal off a path (every player has to have a route to the far side at all times), which turns wall placement into a constant balancing act between blocking your opponent and not wasting your limited supply. Good players start thinking several moves ahead almost immediately, which is the part that will feel familiar if chess is your baseline.
It’s a Mensa Select winner and has sold well over a million copies for a reason: the production is genuinely nice (solid wood pieces, a real board, not cardboard) and the rules take about a minute to explain. We’ve watched non-gamers pick it up faster than almost anything else on this list.
Where it falls short of chess is depth at the very top level. Strong players will eventually solve most positions in a way chess resists even at grandmaster level. That’s a fine trade for a game this teachable, and most of us will never hit that ceiling anyway.
6. YINSH
YINSH gets called a masterpiece often enough in abstract strategy circles that we couldn’t leave it off, even though it’s the least widely known game on this list. Designer Kris Burm built it as part of a series called the GIPF Project, six standalone abstract games that share a design philosophy without sharing rules, and YINSH is generally considered the strongest entry.
Each player has five rings on a hexagonal board. Moving a ring drops a marker behind it, and any markers your ring jumps over get flipped to your color. The goal is to form a row of five same-colored markers, which removes one of your rings from play. You win by removing three of your five rings this way. That inversion, where losing pieces is how you score, takes a game or two to fully click.
This is a slower, denser game than most of the others here, closer in feel to a serious chess match than the quicker abstracts like Onitama or Quoridor. Expect 30 to 60 minutes once both players understand what they’re doing, and expect the first couple of plays to run long while you’re still learning to read the board.
It’s not cheap, and it’s the kind of game you buy because you’re already sold on abstract strategy as a hobby, not because you’re testing the waters. If Go and chess are your baseline for what “deep” means, YINSH earns a spot on the shelf next to them.
7. Abalone
Abalone is closer to checkers than chess in its rules, but it earns its spot here on sheer strategic weight. Each player starts with 14 marbles arranged on a hexagonal board and pushes them in coordinated groups of two or three, trying to shove six of the opponent’s marbles off the edge before they do the same to you.
The core tension is that a strong formation is also a slow one. Marbles packed tightly together are hard to dislodge, but they’re also hard to maneuver into scoring position, so you’re constantly weighing defensive cohesion against offensive reach. It’s a simpler rule set than chess, but the positional thinking it demands is very much in the same family.
Physically it’s one of the most satisfying games on this list. The marbles have real heft, and pushing an opposing marble off the board edge has a tactile payoff that a captured chess piece just doesn’t match.
Where it’s less like chess: the piece set is uniform. Every marble does the same thing, so there’s no equivalent of learning how a knight or bishop behaves differently. That makes it a faster teach than chess, but a shallower one at the extreme top end.
8. The Duke
The Duke is the one on this list that plays most like actual chess, tile for tile. Each player commands a set of troops on a small grid, trying to capture the opposing Duke, and every troop has its own movement pattern printed right on the tile, similar to how a chess piece’s legal moves are just something you memorize.
The mechanic that sets it apart: tiles flip over after they move, and the back side has a different movement pattern than the front. A Footman that moves one square orthogonally might flip to a version that leaps two squares diagonally, and now you have to track two movement profiles per piece instead of one. It’s a clever way to keep a small, fixed army feeling unpredictable without adding any randomness at all.
New troop tiles enter the game from a bag as you play, which is the one piece of variance in an otherwise fully deterministic game, and it keeps games from feeling identical to each other the way two chess games with the same opening can start to.
We haven’t gotten this one to our own table yet, so take this entry as a strong recommendation based on how consistently it comes up in “if you like chess” threads rather than a firsthand account. It’s a legitimate future review candidate for us. If the flipping-tile mechanic sounds appealing, it’s worth seeking out — just know it’s currently out of print. Catalyst Game Labs hasn’t kept it in stock, so your best bet right now is a secondhand copy.
9. Chinese Checkers
We’re including Chinese Checkers with a caveat up front: it’s the softest fit on this list, and if you’re a serious abstract strategy player you may find it too light. There’s no capturing, no elimination, nothing to threaten. You’re just racing your marbles across the star-shaped board into the opposite triangle, hopping over other marbles (yours or an opponent’s) to cover ground fast.
What earns it a spot anyway is that it’s genuinely a perfect-information, no-luck race game, which technically clears the bar we set at the top of this list even if it doesn’t have the tactical bite of Onitama or Hive. It’s also the easiest entry point on here by a wide margin, and the one that scales furthest: up to six players, where most of this list caps at two.
If you’re introducing a chess-curious kid to the idea of thinking several moves ahead before they’re ready for actual chess notation and piece values, this is a gentler on-ramp than anything else here. Just don’t expect it to hold a serious adult chess player’s attention the way the rest of this list will.
The physical sets are usually inexpensive and the marble-hopping chains you can set up late in a game are satisfying in a way that has nothing to do with strategic depth and everything to do with watching dominoes fall.
Conclusion
If you only take one game off this list, make it Onitama. It’s the closest thing to chess’s exact shape: capture the king, control the center, read your opponent’s options before they play them. And it’s teachable in five minutes, finishing before your coffee goes cold. Hive is our second pick if you want something with more physical presence and a genuinely different puzzle to solve.
For a chess player who wants depth over speed, YINSH and Go are where this list gets serious. Neither is a quick recommendation. Both reward the kind of study chess players are already used to putting in.
Most of these are built for two, so if you’re stocking a shelf around that constraint, our best two-player board games list has more options outside the pure-abstract lane. And if what you actually love about chess is the feeling of building toward a position rather than a head-to-head duel, our best engine building board games list is a different kind of “thinking game” worth a look.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
