I worked in the Game Gallery, a retail store in the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, in 1991, and we demoed and sold an awful lot of Quarto that year, possibly because it's an ideal game to demo and play in just a few minutes, even while someone is having their items rung up at a register.
For those unfamiliar with the game, here's almost all that you need to know:
Now the game is playable by those with visual impairments, and the game includes two masks should all players wish to play relying solely on touch and memory.
• The 2021 release TRAPEZ (トラペーツ) from designers Erisa and Ichidai and publisher AsobyTukoos features the minimalism you expect to see in two-player, perfect information abstract strategy games. Here's how to play:
The playing area is a hexagon composed of 19 smaller hexagons. Each player starts with nine hexagon tiles that are half light and half dark, and one tile starts in the center of the playing area. On a turn, place a tile in any orientation you choose on any unoccupied space of the playing area. If this placement fills the last empty space around another tile, you must rotate that newly surrounded tile 60º either clockwise or counterclockwise. (If you surround multiple tiles at the same time, you rotate only one of these surrounded tiles.)
If you create a block of seven tiles that have your color connected across them, you win the game. If all the tiles have been placed without someone winning instantly, whoever has the largest block of color wins, with ties being broken in favor of the starting player.
This description of the game is somewhat lacking detail, but it gives an overall feel of what you're doing in the game:
To set up, shuffle the twenty flower cards, deal four to each player, then lay out the remaining twelve cards in a row. Each player places their florist card next to one of the six cards in the middle of the row, then the game begins.
On a turn, play a card from your hand to move your florist in the market, then pick up the card adjacent to where you moved and leave the played card in its place. If you now have a bouquet in hand — three cards of the same value or type or three cards in a straight — score a bouquet by revealing one flower on your scoring card, then replace the three cards in the bouquet with the three cards at one end of the flower market.
If your florist lands on the same space as the opponent in the market, reveal all cards in your hand to see who has the higher value and wins a point — except that you don't count cards that match the revealed symbols on your opponent's scoring card.