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Strategy games around the world

Strategy is a universal language with strong regional accents. East Asia built institutions around Go. A belt of mancala variants stretches across Africa and beyond. Vikings played a chase game with deliberately unfair sides, and chess changed its rules almost everywhere it landed.

This shelf travels the map — the cultures, the local variants, the etiquette — and ends with the practical payoff: the same open-board games that crossed every border in history now sit in a worldwide lobby in your pocket, where your next opponent may live anywhere at all.

Articles on this shelf

• Go in East Asia: art, sport, philosophy

  Schools, titles, televised matches, and a game treated as a lifelong discipline — Go's extraordinary cultural weight.

• The mancala belt: sowing games across Africa and beyond

  Oware, bao, congkak and cousins: one mechanism, hundreds of local rulesets, and play woven into daily life.

• Tafl: the Viking game of unfair fights

  One side outnumbers the other two to one — on purpose. The asymmetric chase games of the Norse world.

• Shogi, xiangqi, and chess's world family

  Drops in Japan, rivers and cannons in China, different boards, same soul — how chess speaks in local dialects.

• Patolli and the games of the Americas

  What the Aztec, Maya and other American cultures played — and how researchers piece lost rules back together.

• A traveler's guide to strategy games

  Board game cafés, park tables, house rules and lobby etiquette — how to find a game wherever you are.

While you wait for the next article: Oustwit is free for Android and iOS, and the rules take a minute to learn.