Welcome to The Competition!

Welcome to the 2026 edition of the 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. Additionaly, check out our examples to inspire your creativity!

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, the local install page will assist you in setting up a local version of the API.

Competition Timeline

Here is the current outline for the competition:

• 28/02/2026 The competition opens for submissions, testing period starts
• 31/03/2026 Testing period finishes
• 25/08/2026 Submissions Close
• 03/09/2026 Winner revealed at CoG 2026