What games do today is completely irrelevant, though?
Seems like you are missing the point.
There's a reason if both Open AI and Alpha Zero have been trained with playing board games and videogames of any sort, and that's that they offer an environment self-contained enough to have a large but finite number of variables while still offering enough complexity to require flexible approach without a chance to brute-force through them.
On a side note, anyone with even just a passing interest on the topic should check Two Minutes Papers on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz
Monitoring upclose the uncanny rate at which this field is improving feels almost unreal.
We are basically reaching monthly goals that were thought to be decades away barely few years ago.