If your group has a soft spot for a clean two-player abstract, the kind with no luck and nowhere to hide, Stones & Rivers should be on your radar. Designed and illustrated by Trevor Harron for Blue Heron Games, it is one of the abstracts drawing attention ahead of Gen Con 2026, and it does something clever with its pieces.
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See how it worksEvery one of your 14 pieces is double-sided, a river on one face and a stone on the other. The river side sweeps your pieces across the board; the stone side both blocks your opponent and scores. Blue Heron sums the goal up neatly: be the first to land five stones in your opponent's score area. The whole game turns on knowing when to flip a piece from river to stone, when to rotate it and when to push it forward. It has that "easy to teach, hard to master" quality the best abstracts share.
Blue Heron pitches it as a game of mindful placement, and at a listed 35 US dollars for the boxed set it sits at the affordable end of the abstract shelf. There are print-and-play files and a Tabletop Simulator mod floating around too, if you want to try before you buy.
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Find events near youAbstracts like this live or die on finding the right opponent. If you are after someone to trade flips and blocks with, there is a whole community waiting.
Sources: Blue Heron Games | Meeple Mountain
