Volcanoes

This is a prototype for a new board game concept being designed by Simon Dorfman and developed by Scott Clayton.

Rules

The goal of the game is to create a line of adjacent volcanoes which connect tiles on opposite sides of the Pentakis Icosidodecahedron board (an 80-tile sphere-ish shape).

On your turn you may either:

1. Place a level-one volcano of your color on an empty tile
   -or-
2. Grow one of your volcanoes by one level
   e.g. one to two (1→2), two to three (2→3), or three to four (3→4)

Progression of play

1. Player one's turn (Blue always goes first)
2. Player two's turn (Orange always goes second)
3. Growth (every volcano on the board grows one level, except dormant volcanoes at level-four)
4. Player two's turn (Orange's turn)
5. Player one's turn (Blue's turn)
6. Growth

This cycle repeats until a player wins by successfully connecting a pair of antipodes (tiles directly opposite each other).

Eruptions

When a volcano advances to level-four (via a player's turn or via a growth turn), the volcanoes erupt with the following effects:

• The level-four volcano becomes dormant (it stops growing)
• The tiles adjacent to the erupting volcano are affected in the following ways:
  • Friendly volcanoes grow one level (this could trigger another eruption)
  • Enemy volcanoes are destroyed and leave behind empty tiles

Engines

Several computer AIs are included with Volcanoes. Here are the current rankings from a recent round robin tournament:

Our goal is to learn strategies for this game through the analysis of games played by computer AIs.

More information about the last two columns:

• CS = Cumulative Score (number of wins)
• NS = Neustadtl Score (tie break score; basically a score weighted by strength of opposition where a win against a stronger opponent is worth more)

Features

Most engines report their progress while searching for the best move.

The board can be rotated around different axes to make it easier to see paths which wrap around the cyclical board.

Run round robin tournaments with the provided engines to get cross tables and detailed result data.

Player One	Player Two	Winner	Termination	Total Moves	Total Milliseconds	Starting Tile Index	Transcript	Winning Path
Monte Carlo Tree Search	Parallel MCTS	Two	Normal	39	152276	1	N01 N19 G N03 N04 G S24 N15 G S17 N17 G S15 N04 G N23 S04 G S34 S01 G S13 S03 G S10 S13+ G S03 S02 G S02+ S03+ G N19 N05 G S04 N19+ G	N13 N03 N04 N05 N19 N20 N39 N38 S28 S29 S12 S13
Monte Carlo Tree Search	Parallel MCTS	One	Normal	19	109903	46	S39 N24 G S03 S10 G N11 S08 G N04 S01 G N19 S02 G N01 N07 G S02	N10 N11 N27 N28 S38 S39 S20 S19 S05 S01 S02 S10
Monte Carlo Tree Search	Parallel MCTS	Two	Normal	28	87456	7	N09 N07 G N11 N10 G N21 N11+ G N39 N02 G N14 N13 G N01+ N04 G N02 N05+ G N04 N16 G N16+ N03+ G N04	N38 N37 N18 N19 N05 N04 N03 N13 N12 N29 N28 S38