Ace of Aces
I'm doing research for an unannounced project and decided to pick up Ace of Aces, a really fascinating game. In tone and presentation it is a dry 80s style wargame, about WWI biplane dogfighting. However the entire game is two books, one for each player, and on each page of the book is a state of the dogfight.
The relative positions of the two planes, if one is tailing or firing, and then a set of actions one can take. When both players choose an action the game has a double-blind encoding of the result of both actions, and the players flip to the new page and keep flying.
I've only played a few rounds but I found it very delightful. It is a pure theory-of-the-mind tactics game, no resources or any internal state to worry about. I'm also just struck by how creative it is, and how diverse the ways that you can encode and retrieve information from a game. More on that in the future.