Summarizing Strategy Card Game AI Competition

Abstract

This paper concludes five years of AI competitions based on Legends of Code and Magic (LOCM), a small Collectible Card Game (CCG), designed with the goal of supporting research and algorithm development. The game was used in a number of events, including Community Contests on the CodinGame platform, and Strategy Card Game AI Competition at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Conference on Games. LOCM has been used in a number of publications related to areas such as game tree search algorithms, neural networks, evaluation functions, and CCG deckbuilding. We present the rules of the game, the history of organized competitions, and a listing of the participant and their approaches, as well as some general advice on organizing AI competitions for the research community. Although the COG 2022 edition was announced to be the last one, the game remains available and can be played using an online leaderboard arena.