A friend of mine created GoBench[1][2] that evaluates LLMs on 9×9 Go using KataGo opponents as Elo anchors, you see real capability differences there, like Astra Max substantially leading all other models. I think strategy is a generally interesting area to evaluate LLMs on
imho doing it on 9x9s kind of misses the whole point, anyone who has gotten to single digit kyu vs humans will understand when I say its effectively tic tac toe with extra steps
A better benchmark might be asking the LLMs to write GO ai and then comparing that-- the issue is that there will be a HUGE difference in performance that depends purely on this game being in the LLM's training... but training a general LLM to directly play these games would be a waste of capacity and shouldn't be encouraged for benchmaxxing sake.
Programming an engine OTOH is a skill that is more general and they should all have.
Might be useful to have the target of the engine be some specific virtual machine that gets a strict cycle budget-- e.g. execution runs so many cycles, and result is read out of a specific memory address at the end (or when it terminates early).