"Abstract Board Game": the game

So I've noticed that in a lot of what are called "abstract board games" like Chess and Go, there's a kind of common theme to the strategy. I've played a lot of abstract board games, and here are my thoughts. It turns out that in a lot of them, you win by making what's known as a "fork." Let's think of "checking" someone in chess, or "putting someone in atari" in Go. In these cases, one player puts the other one step away from a loss, and that other player MUST respond in order to, in chess, not lose immediately, or in Go, not have a piece or pieces captured from the board (chess can also have threats to individual pieces of course.)

A fork is a situation in which there are *two* immediate threats made simultaneously, such that one's opponent cannot respond to both at the same time and so has lost due to having to choose between two losing situations.  This can be checkmate in chess, or, say, "double atari" in Go, where two stones are put in danger of capture simultaneously and only one can be saved.

In one of my favorite abstract board games, Trax, there is a thing called a "corner" which is basically being one step away from check, or one step away from atari (maybe there's terminology for this in chess and Go also, I'm not sure.) The equivalent of check in Trax can be a "loop threat" (the game is all about winning by making a loop of your color before your opponent makes a loop of theirs.)

In Trax, loop threats aren't always that great because they're easy to get out of. Instead, one tries to make lots of corners, since they give leverage later in the game. Maybe you will be able to "upgrade" two corners at the same time, making two attacks simultaneously, or a fork.

But the other player will try and stop forks from happening. So there ends up being more and more layers of strategy. Some corners which are obviously one step away from a fork can be stopped easily in Trax often, so maybe you want to make two forks at the same time! Like, a kind of "double fork" or maybe you want to make two double forks, a quad fork. It gets complicated.

So anyway, I thought to myself, also in chess, if you can see your opponent is about to win, you can stop them. So you want to be a few steps away from winning, but when you can be a few steps back, you can have lots of ways of winning, and maybe your opponent won't see all the ways to stop all of those ways of winning (maybe you won't see a way either.)

So comes my point, what about making a game that abstracts abstract board games? I've been trying to think of a way for a bit. Had some thoughts for an outline of how the game might work. Here's some rules that won't actually work but I think maybe they could be modified to work.

So here's my non working version, but that I think might be on the right track who knows: You literally have "checkmate" and "check" and "two a way from check" etc cards (in this game the cards will just have values which say how many steps away they are from a win. A "zero" card in your hand is an immediate win let's say.) Now I say this should probably be played on a computer because the cards can change values, and there can be a *lot* of cards.

A breif asside: I also like games with infinite potential so I happened to think this might be one which allows for infinite play in a sense. Let me explain. Preliminary thoughts on possible game rules: on one's turn, one can do one of two things. One can either add cards to one's hand, or upgrade a card in one's hand

To upgrade a card in your hand, you may decrease the number on your card by one, and simultaneously increase the numbers of every card of a certain class in their opponents hand.

To add a card to one's hand, one may do something interesting. One may add one card one away from winning, two cards two away from winning, three cards three away from winning, etc. The infinite comes in in the fact that one could in theory add a million cards a million away from winning (in practice I guess you'll have to draw limits somewhere, but one could just keep a list of the number of cards of each type so it could just *say* someone has a million "million away" cards)

Ok I realize now that the rules as I just wrote them down aren't going to work at all I don't think. But something like this might work.