Game Arena is an open, continuously expanding platform that evaluates large language models through competitive games, allowing head‑to‑head matchups in structured environments. Unlike static benchmarks, it prevents performance saturation by increasing gameplay difficulty as models improve. The report outlines the infrastructure and presents three pilot games—Chess, Poker, and Werewolf—covering perfect information, imperfect information, and multiplayer settings, and details evaluation metrics and competition results.
By Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Yao Yan, Justin Chiu, Hann Wang, Timothy Chung, Martyna Plomecka, John Schultz, Jon Lipovetz, Clayton Drazner, Yuchen Zhuang, Jaimie Hwang, Nate Keating, Riley Jones, Andrew Lee, Oran Kelly, Ian Gemp, Michael Aaron, Laurel Prince, Kate Larson, Jeff Moser, Harrison Jobe, Chad Woodford, Siqi Liu, Andrew Wang, Bo Chang, Christopher D'Mello, Diane Chaleff, Addison Howard, Johnny Yip, Chuck Sugnet, Antonio Gulli, Meghan O'Connell, Will Cukierski, Nenad Tomasev, Dima Yeroshenko, Kinjal Parekh, Roxanne Daniel, Marc Lanctot, Domino Weir, Elsa Dong, Daniel Hennes, Melissa Nalubwama, Robert Fraser, Ryan Trostle, Jun Peng, Tom Mason, Lloyd Hightower, Chiamaka Chukwuka, Yuexiang Zhai, Phoebe Kirk, Yi Su, Yuting Han, Jie Ren, Chris Prichard, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Karim Hakimzadeh, DJ Sterling, Meg Risdal, Kate Olszewska, Ya Xu, Orhan Firat, Minmin Chen
We present FootsiesGym, an open-source environment for learning in a non-trivial two-player, zero-sum, imperfect-information game. Built on HiFight's minimalist 2D fighting game Footsies, it isolates the cyclic, non-transitive strategic interactions of fighting game neutral play while remaining simple enough for efficient analysis.
arXiv:2607. 06514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present FootsiesGym, an open-source environment for learning in a non-trivial two-player, zero-sum, imperfect-information game.
By Chase McDonald, Nathan Tsang, Wesley N. Kerr
A new AI system has become the champion at the board game Stratego, outperforming top-ranked human players. It is more efficient than other models, and its success demonstrates advanced strategic planning capabilities. The system’s performance suggests potential applications for decision-making in military maneuvers and business negotiations.
By Adam Zewe | MIT News
arXiv:2608. 09128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent social settings where they must cooperate, negotiate, and adapt to other agents.
By Keyu He, Xuhui Zhou, Maarten Sap
PTCG-Bench is a new benchmark that uses the Pokémon Trading Card Game to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents on two fronts: their decision‑making within a single complex game environment and their capacity to evolve through accumulated experience. The benchmark includes a modular harness ablation to isolate agent performance from model capability. Experiments show that while LLM agents can achieve non‑trivial gameplay, sustained self‑evolution remains difficult and performance depends on harness design.
By Dongdong Hua, Yifei Sun, Renhong Huang, Feng Gao, Chunping Wang, Yang Yang
arXiv:2608. 09902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Dark Souls Learning Environment (DSLE), a containerized platform that presents all 22 boss encounters of Dark Souls: Remastered as game-playing agent benchmarks through a Gymnasium-style interface.
By Derin Gezgin, Jim O'Connor, Tanner Goodwin, Gary B. Parker
The paper examines the performance of evolutionary transfer learning and TD(lambda) in the three‑dimensional chess game Dragonchess. By re‑implementing the engine in C++ to accelerate play, the authors ran 10,000 games with statistical confidence, showing both adaptive methods outperform all other agents in a round‑robin tournament. The results indicate no significant performance difference between the evolved and learned evaluation functions, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive techniques in complex, novel game domains.
By Jim O'Connor, Annika Hoag, Sarah Goyette, Gary B. Parker
OpenBlock is an open, adaptive tile‑matching platform that uses a dual‑track content‑generation system: a deterministic rule‑based generator and an optional learned generator, both verified to ensure every piece set is fully placeable. A self‑play reinforcement‑learning agent diagnoses that long‑bar pieces become largely unplaceable at high board fill, indicating board‑state degeneration rather than difficulty drives late‑game failure. In live play, the learned track improves day‑1 retention by 1.8 percentage points and session duration by 7% compared to the rule track alone.
By Jiang Jun
arXiv:2608. 12593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discovery---formulating novel generalizations---is a central part of the scientific process.
By Ruairidh M. Battleday, Kai Sandbrink, Jimi Cullen-Drohan, Zihan Yan, Timothy Muller, Clare Maguire, Ales Kubicek, Fraser Greenlee-Scott, Sukrit Sumant, Tri Dao, J\"urgen Schmidhuber, Michal Valko, Joshua Tenenbaum, Thomas L. Griffiths, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, James C. R. Whittington
We introduce the Dark Souls Learning Environment (DSLE), a containerized platform that presents all 22 boss encounters of Dark Souls: Remastered as game-playing agent benchmarks through a Gymnasium-style interface. DSLE combines real-time combat, high-dimensional visual input, and sparse terminal rewards, with each environment step being a real action executed against the running game.
arXiv:2606. 23995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has established that regularized policy gradient methods such as PPO, when used in self-play, can match or exceed specialized game-theoretic algorithms for solving two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games.
By Tristan Maidment, JB Lanier, Chase McDonald, Nathan Tsang, Eugene Vinitsky, Roy Fox, Albert Wang, Wesley N. Kerr