Welcome to Bot Bowl

botbowl

Bot Bowl is an annual AI competition in the board game Blood Bowl (Games Workshop). Blood Bowl is a fully-observable, stochastic, turn-based, modern-style board game with a grid-based game board. At first sight, the game ought to be approachable by numerous game-playing algorithms. However, as all pieces on the board belonging to a player can be moved several times each turn, the turn-wise branching factor becomes overwhelming for traditional algorithms. Additionally, scoring points in the game is rare and difficult, which makes it hard to design heuristics for search algorithms or apply reinforcement learning.

We see Blood Bowl as the next board game challenge for AI. You can read more about this in our paper Blood Bowl: A New Board Game Challenge and Competition for AI.

Go to the tutorials page to get started or read more about the upcoming Bot Bowl IV.

The Bot Bowl competitions are organized by Niels Justesen and the repoistory is hosted here on GitHub https://github.com/njustesen/botbowl.

Disclaimers and Copyrighted Art

Bot Bowl is not affiliated with or endorsed by any company and/or trademark. Bot Bowl is an open research framework and the authors have no commercial interests in this project. The web interface in Bot Bowl currently uses a small set of icons from the Fantasy Football Client. These icons are not included in the license of Bot Bowl. If you are the author of these icons and don’t want us to use them in this project, please contact us at njustesen at gmail dot com, and we will replace them ASAP. The team icons are from FUMBBL and are used with permission. The license described in LICENSE only covers the source code - not any of the graphics files.

Get Involved

Do you want implement a Bow Bowl bot or perhaps help us test, develop, and/or organize AI competitions? Join the bot bowl Discord server.