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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go. If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)

This website lets players compete in abstract strategy board games including Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6. Users can play against friends online or practice against bots. The platform is designed for people… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    I posted once before but wanted to share again because a lot has changed. There's now a fairly strong bot to play against (contributed by a community member) and also correspondence games. The combination of these things helps a bit in finding people to play against.

    Aug 2026 · voronoigo.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    BreakBase.com. Play your favorite games, with anyone you

    2012 · breakbase.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    A free-to-play automated strategy game

    2019 · bot.land · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The best pyramid solitaire game online

    2024 · pyramid.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Play chess online for free on Chess.com with over 250 million members from around the world. Have fun playing with friends or challenging the computer!

    2011 · multiplayerchess.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Play chess online for free against computer or friend!

    Jan 2026 · free-online-chess.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!

    Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Multiplayer turn-based strategy mobile game.

    2019 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9OC

    My personal project: https://github.com/leonidasdeim/chasse Goal was to build session based chessboard game without any rules - to play just like oldschool over the board. Just create new board and share link with a friend. I would appreciate any feedback and github star. Thanks!

    2023 · chasse.fun · its alternatives →

  10. 10BG

    Tl;dr: Would like to hear thoughts on board games platform prototype (https://bordga.me/games/7) We are building an online board games platform which lets you create & play any board game online while video chatting with your co-players. Game play resembles the real world where users have to do everything from moving the pieces to enforcing the rules. We are quite early in our journey. We prototyped Chess to see if people would be interested in this direction. Please try it here! (https://bordga.me/games/7) You can enter your name that creates a new…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Tox gives a reviewer's take on making an exceptional game

    2016 · happymittengames.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Play multiplayer games online with friends, other players, and bots from around the world for free on FunNode.

    2016 · funnode.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Vassal▲54

    Engine for building & playing online board games/card games

    2015 · vassalengine.org · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Interviews and play testing with designers and publishers

    2016 · happymittengames.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess. Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information. From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling. It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.

    2024 · polyreplay.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Provably fair backgammon with expert AI and analysis

    Aug 2026 · boardgammon.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17IT

    I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…

    May 2026 · its alternatives →

  18. 18IB

    I built a multiplayer strategy game for AI agents called Artifice. You give an agent a strategy prompt and it plays on its own. Games are 4 players, 25 turns, simultaneous actions, fog of war, and free-text diplomacy between agents. The main entry point is the site: https://artificegame.com And here is the github repo: https://github.com/burakcan/artifice You can watch live games there with the full map, troop movements, and private messages between agents. A lot of the fun has come from the playtests. In one of them, an agent was told to play like an old man…

    Mar 2026 · artificegame.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi I've created a text-based RPG game in which you can experience different adventures and play interesting characters while the AI acts as a real time DM/story teller. There are multiple ways to interact with AI: 1) Input free will move 2) Input default move (affects resources) 3) Post a question to DM Also one more cool feature is that you can create your own adventure via simple form. Add scenes, add characters and make it public so other players are able to test it. I also plan to have 'competetive' side where players will pay some small fee to creators in crypto depending on…

    2023 · landing.v3rpg.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hey HN, I made https://linkians.com which is a game where all the action and state is contained in the url. The game involves taking care of little pets (emojis) that live in your url bar. Kind of like tamagotchi or sims. Feed them, play with them, and watch out for enemies! There's no server, just emojis in the url and client-side logic. Any linkians url using the supported emojis is a valid game state so you can save your game, or type out your own url and send it to a friend. I'd appreciate any feedback.

    2022 · linkians.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21AP

    Most people like free things, some people like games. If you like 'm both then this might be something for you! I've made a website, a Discord bot, a Twitter bot, and a bunch of scrapers that roam the web to find free games out there. Just so that they can be found in one place by other people. I'm running this on my own server, so I'm curious as to how much traffic it can handle. The Discord and Twitter bots run on a fixed interval, so that shouldn't be much of a bottleneck. You can check it out online at: https://www.freegameisafreegame.com On Twitter at…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…

    2024 · fiftygame.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!

    Apr 2026 · leetchess.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24OS

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