Finding sub-goals

I'm looking for suggestions how to find sub-goals given only a game description. Human players and special-purpose programs (such as for chess, Othello, etc) rely heavily on evaluating sub-goals to reduce the search space and improve playing strength, but it's far from obvious how to do that in general game playing. Obviously a player might have a few canned strategies and try each of them to see what works, and a player with access to game history might extract sub-goals from what worked in the past, but given only a game description?

A bit of web searching really did not turn up anything useful or even very interesting.

Any suggestions much appreciated.