Search for chess like strategy games and you get back a stack of board game lists. Cardboard is great, but it is not much use to you at a keyboard. This ranking covers digital picks only, judged against one hard standard. Can you see everything on the board, and does luck ever get to decide the game for you?

What Counts as Perfect Information Here

Chess has no dice and no face-down cards. Both players see the entire board and the entire rule set at every moment, which means any loss belongs to you. Perfect information strategy games keep that contract in digital form. No fog of war, no hidden hands, no damage rolls.

That standard eliminates most of the genre immediately. Fog of war rules out nearly every 4X and RTS. Damage variance rules out most tactics games, including the Advance Wars lineage in its original form. What survives is a short list, and the games on it are unusually good. If you want the wider puzzle-adjacent shelf, our roundup of strategy puzzle games covers the single-player end of the same instinct.

1. Into the Breach

The best version of this idea anyone has built. Every enemy on the eight-by-eight grid announces exactly what it will do next turn and exactly where, so each round is a solvable problem rather than a gamble. Subset Games built it that way on purpose after FTL, wanting a game where every death felt like the player’s own fault. It succeeds so completely that losing stings in a way random games never manage.

The fair criticism is structural. New squads are earned across runs, so your early hours hand you loadouts that make certain islands genuinely rough, and the tiny grid starts repeating itself after thirty or forty runs. Take it anyway. Nothing else delivers this much decision density per minute, and the wider mech tactics shelf mostly follows its lead.

2. 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel

Actual chess, plus the ability to move a piece back in time and split the game into a parallel timeline. It sounds like a joke and plays like a genuine extension of the rules. Released in July 2020 by Conor Petersen, it holds a 96 percent positive rating across more than six thousand reviews, which is remarkable for something this hostile to newcomers.

The learning curve is a wall, not a slope. Four AI personalities and a puzzle collection soften the landing, but finding human opponents near your level is the real problem. Play it for the moment the geometry finally clicks, which usually arrives around hour six.

3. Wargroove 2

The Advance Wars formula with the randomness surgically removed. Damage is no longer variable, so the number the interface shows you is the number you get. Critical hits still exist, but they fire on fixed positional conditions rather than dice. A Swordsman crits beside your commander, a Pikeman crits beside another Pikeman, a Knight crits after covering six tiles, a Ranger crits when it holds still.

That single change turns each attack into arithmetic you can do before committing. The campaign spikes hard in its back half and the storybook art undersells how sharp the systems are, which is probably why it gets overlooked. It is the strongest pick here for head-to-head play against a friend.

4. Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate

You are the black king, alone, holding a shotgun, against the entire white army. Between fights you draft upgrade cards that buff you and buff the enemy at the same time. It is the cleverest thing anyone has done with a chessboard in years, and it costs about as much as a sandwich.

Be honest about the compromise: the card draws are random, so this is not a strict member of the club. It earns the spot because the board itself never hides anything. Every piece is visible, every threat is countable, and every death traces back to a square you should not have stood on.

Honorable Mentions

The licensed digital version of Hive is the purest abstract on this page, with five AI difficulty levels and the Pillbug, Ladybug, and Mosquito expansions sold separately. It sits in the mentions rather than the ranking because the client has aged badly since 2013 and the interface fights you more than the opponent does.

Chess Ultra covers you if the answer is simply chess. Ripstone shipped it in 2017 with grandmaster-approved AI and genuinely handsome boards, and its 76 percent positive rating across roughly 1,800 reviews tells the story accurately. The presentation outclasses the plumbing. For Go and Onitama, the free browser clients are better than anything sold on a storefront.

Where to Start

Buy Into the Breach first. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you actually enjoy games like chess in digital form or whether you just liked the idea of them. If it grips you, Wargroove 2 is the natural follow-up for playing another human, and 5D Chess is where you go once ordinary boards feel too small.

Skip the whole category if you like comebacks. These games do not hand out miracles, and a lost position stays lost. That is the trade. More of our ranked shelves live across Strategygame.org, and the broader tactical turn-based list loosens the no-randomness rule if this one felt too strict.

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