One very good strategy board game is Stratego (notice the name even implies strategy =) ). It''s got very good strategy elements including hiding your intentions since the opposing side cannot see what your units are. There are also quite a few different strategies to play with from killing the enemy general (the #1), to flag hiding, to spy detecting.
There''s also Risk but that includes a lot of dice rolling but that averages out so you can basically tell who is going to win large battles. Main strategies for that are pretty much where you set up and what continents you try to get first (I like Australia personally).
Warhammer 40k is really good too, but probably not what you''re looking for since its not a set board and its a bit expansive for a classroom to study. Wish I could still play it, however time, money, and lack of interest from my friends all prevent me =(.

As for computer games, your best bet is to look at turn-based games like the Civilization series. Real time games probably don''t have the strategy element that you''re searching for.

That''s my two or three cents.

-Othello is a great (non-electric) strategy board game; an ingenius ripoff of checkers. It takes about 30 seconds to learn how to play. The boards and pieces are so similar that you can play the game checkers using the pieces of an Othello game, yet the two games themselves play entirely differently. It displays forced progression (the game cannot under any circumstances idle or loop endlessly) and has a definite conclusion (when the board gets filled up completely, the game''s over and you count scores). The only way it could be improved would be to go from an 8x8 grid to a 9x9, thus making tie games impossible.
[my own terms]
- Lubb

Id recommend you used games iwth more contrast than go and chess, just in terms of being able to make interesting comparisons in lecture notes. Chess or go alone are pretty cool, especially to illustrate that a fairly simple rule set can make a very deep game, and that strategic depth != complexity.

I think monopoly is a nice game to contrast, because theres a lot of probabalistic analysis avaliable, and a good mix of opportunity realization and opportunity denial in other players -- plus cementing your position in various contingencies. It also has a number of "flaws" to pick apart, which again, makes for interesting discussion.

I Believe theres a good 300 page book specifically on it -- I forget the title.

Normal edition magic the gathering isnt a bad choice either, but you might have a familiarity problem with the players. Its pretty easy to dissect as well though.

Just a thankyou, keep the comments coming...

I''m going to devote class time to the games that are going to be played (I''ll have one three hour block per week).

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

Did anyone mention Magic: The Gathering? There''s a lot of theory there, especially regarding mana costs, proportion of mana-producing cards to mana-consuming cards, the size of the deck of cards, and so on. I suppose you could call it Poker with resource management. It is 80% strategy and 20% tactics in my opinion, and the only random element is the ordering of the cards, unlike dice games where you cannot guarantee a certain number of results over a given period. Well worth looking into.

I considered using magic as an example, but I have only ever watched people play, so even though I could use it as a theoretical example, I lack experience of the game itself to describe or evaluate strategic decisions.

I would still recommend you did some research on it, if only to mention it briefly, as there are a lot of people who have dissected the theory behind choosing various cards for their decks and so on. Anyway, playing it yourself won''t teach you everything since there are thousands of different cards, so just looking at the theories put forward by players would be a decent enough start.

Majic is a bad example, precisely because it has thousands of cards. There are entire statistical volumes written on playing poker; Majic is hopelessly open-ended, and unfit as an example in a course on game analysis.
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Checkers is a good example: it displays forced progression (opponents can only move forward at first, guaranteeing interaction), it has a definite conclusion (a point in time within the game when one player definitely wins), and a tie game is not possible. Plus, it''s easy to learn, and most peole already know how to play it anyway.
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It is also interestng to note that chess is about the most complicated game that has ever been popular, and remained popular for any length of time. - Lubb

No, magic is fine. Just limit it to one of the standard sets, and keep out expansions and old stuff. The standard sets are pretty clean.

One way to analyze the play structure of any game is this:
Suppose that somebody else is going to write a game of some type, and suppose it''s your job to write another program to play their game. What exactly does your program have to do to play their game? There''s coordination tasks (movement), there''s memorization tasks, there''s ordering tasks, there''s item matching, and probably a few others. Majic is simply item (numbers) matching; D&D in its more technical form is simply item matching.
Another thought is that (among long-lived, widely played games) most good games use a small number of well-integrated/interdependent elements (pieces and rules): the outside limit of this are chess and card games. If you eliminated one type of piece from chess, it would drastically alter the game, perhaps making it unplayable. Some games like Othello only have one piece.
-As for Majic, it''s not only a game: it was/is a marketing exercise, just as D&D was. Most of the different cards ever made were made not because they were necessary to the game, but because the owners wanted more kinds of cards to sell. The problem here is that it ruined whatever chance there was at (developing) something interesting: it is ham-fisted complexity slathered on after the fact. Majic is a puddle, a hundred miles across and an inch deep. It was real popular among kids for a short time, but (in case you haven''t noticed) it''s popularity has dropped off greatly and it never caught on with the general public.
-Computer game makers fall into this trap often also: adding in-game options and features, and then making them necessary inside the game in a misguided effort to "add strategic elements". Action games are particularly bad about this, and many try to substitute control complexity for game complexity. The only "good" new computer action games coming out now are for consoles, because game companies can''t fall back on control complexity to provide part (or all!) of the challenge: these are the only computer games that are easy to learn to control , but difficult to play . - Lubb