SimpleTak

Description

SimpleTak is an environment for evaluating agents on a simplified version of Tak played on a 4x4 grid. This environment wraps the SimpleTak implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Strategic board game playing with road-building mechanics
• Piece placement and stack movement decisions
• Competitive gameplay against LLM opponents
• Evaluation across multiple difficulty variants (medium, large, extreme)

Compute Requirements

SimpleTak does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (600 tasks) and test (600 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 12 variants:

• SimpleTak-v0
• SimpleTak-v0-extreme
• SimpleTak-v0-extreme-raw
• SimpleTak-v0-extreme-train
• SimpleTak-v0-large
• SimpleTak-v0-large-raw
• SimpleTak-v0-large-train
• SimpleTak-v0-medium
• SimpleTak-v0-medium-raw
• SimpleTak-v0-medium-train
• SimpleTak-v0-raw
• SimpleTak-v0-train

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given a single tool:

• make_move(move): Make a move in SimpleTak. For placement: a position number (e.g., "0", "1", ..., "15"). For moves: use the move notation from available moves.

Time Horizon

SimpleTak is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Medium to Hard - requires strategic planning and spatial reasoning.

Other Environment Requirements

This environment requires an OpenAI API key (passed via secrets) to power the LLM opponent.

Safety

Agents in SimpleTak interact only with a board game and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}