Gomoku
Gomoku, also called "Five in a Row", is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces (black and white stones) on a Go board, using 15×15 of the 19×19 grid intersections. Because pieces are not moved or removed from the board, Gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names.
Abstract strategy game
An abstract strategy game is a strategy game in which the theme is not important to the experience of playing. Many of the world's classic board games, including chess, Go (also called "wei-chi" and "baduk"), checkers and draughts, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese version of Chinese chess), Reversi (marketed as "Othello"), Nine Men's Morris, and most mancala variants, fit into this category. Play is sometimes said to resemble a series of puzzles the players pose to each other. As J. Mark Thompson wrote in his article "Defining the Abstract": There is an intimate relationship between such games and puzzles: every board position presents the player with the puzzle, What is the best move?, which in theory could be solved by logic alone. A good abstract game can therefore be thought of as a "family" of potentially interesting logic puzzles, and the play consists of each player posing such a puzzle to the other. Good players are the ones who find the most difficult puzzles to present to their opponents.