I love Spirit Island! Probably played more hours of that game than any other in my collection. Granted, it's purely a cooperative game, and much more artificially complex ("fiddly") than any abstract. It's the immortal simplicity and competition of games like chess and go that I was looking to rekindle, but I guess they aren't well suited to modern gaming tastes.
Dominion is also great, and in its simplicity literally invented the deck building genre. But it, too, is too artificially complex to become immortal, even before you get into its 16+ expansions. The proliferation of the deck builder genre also makes it less likely any individual game is going to be deeply studied.
Credit to games like YINSH, anyway, that specifically try to appeal to competitive, deep, and mathematically simple foundations. They just don't have what it takes to thrive in the age of monetized bright flashing lights.
I also think the gipf games haven't had enough time and volume of players to see if they are actually as long-term engaging as chess and go. my speculation is that the classic abstracts are the ones that turned out to have an almost accidental emergent depth that kept people playing them even as better and better strategies were devised, because they were never "solved". it is unclear if yinsh will turn out to have an endless stream of better and better strategies emerge, or if it will be fun while people figure it out but plateau when they do.
The Gipf games have had some two decades now, and quite competitive online scenes for some of the games. They've been played enough to know they aren't broken or trivially human-solvable (Zèrtz on the smallest board option probably is but like most of the Gipf games, it's very naturally extendable to a larger board.) Dvonn and Gipf had strong bots for them even in the pre-MCTS age, but that's not really a problem. None of the Gipf games are drawish.
Whether they become "timeless classics" and get a stream of discoveries or not I think is mostly down to chance. It's more about what we let them be in our lives than their inherent qualities.
I haven't played YINSH, but I haven played some of the other games in that "series". You're aware of the others, right? Which is your favorite (YINSH I assume)?
Only played YINSH, and only a few games. It's nice and I would be eager to play more, but unsure if I would study it deeply myself even if it did become popular. A lot of abstracts tend to blend together in my head as "combinatorial slugfests," where the player with the most RAM in their brain wins out. (YINSH may or may not be like that, don't take my word for it.) It's the primary reason I switched from chess to go, where my propensity to make tactical blunders can at least be offset by larger scale planning and good directional judgement.
Not the OP, but I liked ZERTZ. It's very symmetric, almost, but not quite, an "impartial game" in mathematical terms (where you don't have to know whose move it is to know if they have a winning position). You can set up the most outrageous combinations, going from nothing to having won with a series of forced moves.
Dominion is licensed in various online incarnations anyway.
With limits on expansions and other rules, it is possible to get Dominion competitive enough to study games and optimize for turns, the original isotropic had a decent ranking and rating system (RIP and add’l shoutout for their implementation of the Innovation card game):
Dominion is also great, and in its simplicity literally invented the deck building genre. But it, too, is too artificially complex to become immortal, even before you get into its 16+ expansions. The proliferation of the deck builder genre also makes it less likely any individual game is going to be deeply studied.
Credit to games like YINSH, anyway, that specifically try to appeal to competitive, deep, and mathematically simple foundations. They just don't have what it takes to thrive in the age of monetized bright flashing lights.