is chess the hardest game?

HusbandS!

well as Mae West used to say. "A hard game is good to find"......Just thinking outloud here.

Mathematicians rate the complexity of games by the size of the tree of lines that can be played from the initial position.  On this basis, go is the hardest followed by shogi, xiangqi, then chess, and finally checkers.

Games like bridge, dominos and snap are usually classed as games of chance because much depend on the cards or dominos you are dealt.  They are not complex so much as based on luck.

 hahaha - I remember a joke - a guy advertised in the newspaper "looking for a wife". He got lots of letters, surprisingly from all male. The gist of each was, "you can have mine".

 But cricket is so simple:

You have two sides: one out and one in.

Each man who's in the side that's in goes out and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out.

When they're all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When both sides have been in and out including the "not outs" that's the end of the game.

Howzat!

It goes on for 5 days and the most common result is a draw.  It is the archetype of a civilized game.  I mean what other game enshrines the lunch-break and the tea interval into the rules.  You can't beat class.

Hahaha... best description for cricket ever! I love it and so does Sky Sports! 

Russian roulette with automatic pistols is hard.

Go is the most complex.

 I would say bridge is the hardest. Chess is realy easy though, I learned how to play chess in 3 days.

I think soccer (football) is the hardest game because you have to run all the time.

Part of the reason that many eastern variants like Shogi seem so hard is because the characters used on the pieces are confusing to westerners.  Once you learn them, though, I don't think those variants are any more or less difficult than standard chess.  Shogi was very easy for me to learn, and in some ways, I'm better at it because it seems like imagination is just as important in Shogi as strict calculation is.  The "parachute" drops give it an added dimension, but since both players have that ability, it doesn't necessarily make it harder, just that you must think "outside the box".

tiddily winks!!!

Go is phenomenally hard, but chess is similarly hard in a different way.

Go has a greater strategic bent than chess, and chess a greater tactical bent. Neither is harder. Computers are better at chess because tactics favour computers.

Whilst I agree with your general line of thinking, there's one major quibble I have. "Neither is harder". That's far from clear. I would guess that one of them is almost certainly harder, it's just that mostly they are different, and it's unclear as of yet which is harder.

Whoever said Chess is hardest because computers haven't solved it yet... well yes, but with Go the difference is far more pronounced.

Top computers beat top GMs nowadays, whereas top Go players thrash the best computer Go players.

It may be a naive question but I really don't know - do Go computer softwares are as well developed and strong as the top chess programs these days?

Tonico, as far as I know, they're both developing as fast as they can - so yes.

Go simply has many more variations than chess and computers aren't able to mechanically analyse enough to make them good enough to take on good humans.

It seems the long-term strategic planning of Go is much harder to input in an engine than with chess.

OK, thanks!

I might have a go at Go!! 

Whatever. Neither can be shown to be harder. What does "harder" even mean?

How do you not know what harder means? I knew that when I was 4.

It means there is more trouble  to overcome the rules to be a good player and  more effort is needed, if we're talking in terms of games. Also complex rules make it harder to master a game because more elements of a game need to be utilized and it's harder to know what you're doing and can be overwhelmed.