Abalone at 25, new classic or just another game?

Abalone in close up

With a new variant for Abalone called Off Board apparently on its way to America, it's worth taking a look at how the original game has fared now that a quarter century has passed.

Abalone is in that family of games known as "abstracts" or "perfect information" games, so called because there are no hidden or random elements. Both players have complete information about the board situation at all times and perfect control over their own moves. The classic games of chess and go are probably the best known of this type of game, but creating new ones has been a fascination for game designers for generations.

Yet despite thousands of attempts, no new abstract has ever really threatened the preeminence of chess in the West or Go in the East. While neither of those classic games is the top dog among the denizens of Boardgame Geek's gamer hobbyists, both rate reasonably high and neither has any real context in the general culture. Both Chess and Go have their own devoted cadres of hobbyists with their own Internet sites, publications, tournaments, professional players and general infiltration into the popular culture. Some modern games have also achieved this status such as Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering, but there are themed games with random elements and/or hidden information.

Standard set up for Abalone

When it first appeared in the late 1980s and 1990 Abalone caused quite a stir and was widely available in non-game retailers. It won a bunch of awards at various game festivals and publications and the company even started a "North American Federation of Abalone." (Oddly, while abalone is a fish, the game's name is either a play off the graphic design of the word which can be read "3 2 ONE" on its side or from an odd combo of Latin and English  AB (Latin away from) + ALONE = ABALONE (Unity in strength) according to Vol. 1 No. 1 of the NAFA Newsletter in 1991. Evidently there was no issue No. 2.

There were cash prizes for tournament winners and the other trappings of new game hype. I remember seeing a very nice over sized wooden version of the game played at Origins around 1995.

And it is a very nice looking game. The large glass marbles are striking and the unique, patented game board are very eye-pleasing.

Abalone is hardly dead. BoardGame Geek reported plays show it has  steady fan base. In 2011, for example, there were 31 to110 plays reported each month by between 1 and 27 unique users, a very respectable pace for a two-decade old game. Its wide availability is attested by the fact that 3,555 BGG members report owning a copy.

Abalone's claim to fame is it's unique "pushing" mechanic, where the players battle over the board by using groups of two or three marbles to literally push a smaller group of one or two marbles as part of their move. If a marble is pushed off the board it is captured and the first player to push off six marbles wins the game.

It can be a very fast playing game, illustrated by many of ts fans who report playing a couple of dozen games in a session. it's easy to teach to children and unlike many abstracts it has a nice tactile element that's hard to replicate on  a screen, so I think it has some resistance to being replaced entirely by electronic versions.

The original game is just two-player, but more marbles in additional colors can be purchased and there are some multiplayer variants. I have a third set of marbles and have played the 3-player variant. The new Off Board edition appears to be a 4-player version of the game.

"A New Classic" Vol. 1, No. 1, Oct. 1991

Yet despite being widely available, still played and an award-winning game, Abalone is still no real contender for the "Classic" crown. I think the basic problem for the game is that there's really not all that much there there. One problem endemic to evenly matched perfect information games is the tendency to be  drawish. While it's very hard to actually stalemate a game of Abalone (I have read that it's possible) the course of the game between two evenly matched players is likely to be very much like a sumo match. Am awful lot of pushing and shoving that;s opportunistic but very little in the way of actual strategy.

And this, I think, is its problem, While there are plenty of players who aren't into having a heavy dose of strategy in their games, they don't tend to be the players of perfect information abstracts. Abalone is, really, what I like to call a "trivial" game, in that it can be fun, but there's little incentive to indulging in a lot of analysis. In other genres game like this tend to have heavy luck elements such as the card games Fluxx and Munchkin or dice games like Cosmic Wimpout or Can't Stop. Not so much with perfect information abstracts where there's too much of a risk of becoming a solvable puzzle like Tic Tac Toe.

Among all the forum postings about Abalone on BGG there's just one short one on strategy, that points out the value of holding the center space on the board. That's just not much to build a "classic" game on after 25 years.

Game nght at church

We had a game night at my church, and I'll post photos soon, but it was rather successful.

We had a number of old favorites and classics of course, such as Scrabble, Sorry, Yahtzee and cribbage. But I was also able to introduce some newer stuff to several comments like "I've never seen that before" such as Lost Cities, Hive and Heroscape.

We also had games of dominoes, Oh-Wah-Ree and Abalone hit the table.

Fluxx was also a big hit, I think it's a perfect game for an outing like this, being fun, easy to learna nd very quick to play.

Three-player Abalone

Abalone's one of the better modern abstracts. The rules are straightforward, it introduces a new conflict-resolution technique (pushing) and it looks real nice. I just can't figure out why it's named after a fish!

The basic game is two-player and while I haven't exhausted all the potential of the standard set-up I see from its Web site that there are dozens of variant set ups, which is another attributes setting it apart from most abstracts.

There are also rules for multi-player versions. although both the even-number versions (4- or 6-player) are team games. The 5-player version puts the fifth player in the middle of the board, handing him/her the key location in the game, although at a cost of one marble. I haven't played that one, so I'm not sure how that will work.

I have played the 3-player version a little bit, though. It's the most like the 2-player game in that it's every man for himself and all players start even in material and position.

Unlike the 2-player version of the game, with three players it's harder to put together a strategy. One has to play more opportunistically because the board changes configuration twice in-between your moves. Not only that, but it's harder to anticipate those changes because you can't be sure how the other players will interpret the board situation. In the 2-player game you're each working directly against one opponent, but in the 3-player situation there's additional dynamics at work. Each of your opponents has to choose each turn who he will concentrate on. it's very rare that there's a single move available that hurts each opponent equally.

On top of that, there's the problem of massing enough force to execute an offensive. The defense is the stronger form of warfare in Abalone anyway and in the 2-player game it can take a few turns of maneuver to set up a good attack. But in the 3-player game each player only represents one-third of the potential offensive power, instead of half. Or another way of looking at it is that a player in the 2-way game is attacking at 1-1 odds while in the 3-way game you're fighting at 1-2 odds.

The three-way dynamic helps keep the game from bogging down in a stalemate. The situation is inherently less stable than the 2-sided game. If one player is weaker than the other two the game can devolve into a race to see who can beat up the weakest one fastest and get to six marbles. If one player gets picked on and loses 3 or 4 marbles they can lose almost all offensive ability.

The game still works as a three-player game, although I think it's more chaotic than the 2-player game.