The 2025 Tabletop Games Balancing Competition

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Welcome to The Competition!

Welcome to the inaugral Tabletop Games Balancing Competition! Your goal is to create an optimisation algorithm which is able to best balance Tabletop Games implemented in the TAG framework. If you are itching to get making, head over to our quickstart guide, otherwise read on to find out how the compeition works.

Competition Outline

This competition treats game balancing as a black-box optimisation problem, you input a set of chosen rules for each game (e.g., HandSize=5), the game is played multiple times in TAG with your chosen rules, then the results are processed and you are given a balance score (how balanced the game is). Your aim is to maximise this balance score.

In reality, what makes a balanced game is subjective (Here is a good paper on the topic), but for the purposes of our competition, each game will be given an arbitrary score detailed in their section on the games page.

To submit an entry you will need to create an account. Our accounts are created through signing in with GitHub, thus implictly a GitHub account is required to enter this competition. If you do not have a GitHub account you can create one here.

API

In order to find an optimal set of game rules, we provide an HTTP API which you can use to interact with TAG. This means the competition is language agnostic, as long as you can make HTTP requests you can develop your entry (you could even use Pen & Paper!), the documentation page contains detailed information on all the API methods.

We host an instance of this API which you can access through http://balancing-competition.tabletopgames.ai/api/. An API key is required to use this instance, one can be generated in your user settings.

However, we understand that if you are running lots of requests you might prefer a local solution. We are working on implementing a self-hosted version of the API, and hope to get it released promptly.

Competition Timeline

Here is the current outline for the competition:

  • Competition Launches with Dominion
  • Exploding Kittens Added
  • Seven Wonders Added
  • 24/05 Can’t Stop Added
  • 01/06 Self-Hosted Version Available
  • 01/06 Final Submissions Start
  • 14/08 Final Submissions Close
  • 26/08 Winner revealed at CoG 2025

Leaderboard