The Pandemic board game, implemented in C#. Intended for usage by AI agents.
- install dotnet core (tested with v7)
# run tests
dotnet test
cd pandemic.console
# Play around with running the game in a console app.
# See Program.cs: it does whatever's not commented out.
dotnet run- pandemic: core game logic. Immutable & DDD-inspired
- pandemic.agents: agents that can play games
- pandemic.console: scratchpad console app. Uncomment stuff in Program.cs to run it.
- pandemic.perftest: repeatable test runs for profiling and benchmarking
- pandemic.drawing: draw game trees (graphviz dot output)
- utils: C# language/library utils
Check tag just-before-remove-unused-network-code for a network game server implementation.
This would be good to know. If not all games are winnable, then there's no point trying to make a bot that can win every game.
It has been shown that determining whether a game is winnable is NP-complete: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ipsjjip/20/3/20_723/_article. Article found via: https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research#pandemic
Here are some thoughts. Using a simplified game, where there are only city cards, infection cards, and no special abilities:
An unwinnable case is easy to find if players don't consider each other's hands. For example, consider a game where the player deck ends up giving all players an even spread of colours except for one. Each player discards this one colour in an effort to reach enough cards of another colour to cure it. Quite soon, enough of the one colour has been discarded that it is impossible to cure that colour.
If each player takes each others' hands into account, and they don't attempt to collect cards of the same colour, it still seems easy enough to find an unwinnable configuration of the player deck, however I haven't tried.
Players could also take into account which cards have been discarded, in order to not discard too many of any one colour. This may increase the odds of winning, but makes analysing 'winnability' too tedious for my attention span to handle.
Uncomment WinLossStats.PlayGamesAndPrintWinLossStats to get these stats. So far,
the best performance I've got is from playing many games with GreedyAgents. This
agent picks the 'best' move based on a GameEvaluator, which is just a scorer I
wrote to indicate how 'good' a game state is.
Other agents like greedy best-first, DFS run forever without finding a win. I think the app needs some performance improvements to make search-based agents more viable. Also, I think there is quite a bit of luck involved in winning a game, so searching is futile for unwinnable games.
PlayGamesAndPrintWinLossStats prints out statistics similar to https://forum.boardgamearena.com/viewtopic.php?t=25373
Greedy agent performance for 2 player games:
Role stats: Medic: 29 wins, 233 losses (11.1%) OperationsExpert: 25 wins, 228 losses (9.9%) Researcher: 24 wins, 235 losses (9.3%) QuarantineSpecialist: 21 wins, 237 losses (8.1%) Scientist: 20 wins, 257 losses (7.2%) ContingencyPlanner: 12 wins, 271 losses (4.2%) Dispatcher: 11 wins, 259 losses (4.1%)
Team stats: M, R : 11 wins, 33 losses (25.0%) M, O : 8 wins, 30 losses (21.1%) Q, R : 6 wins, 32 losses (15.8%) O, S : 6 wins, 41 losses (12.8%) O, Q : 5 wins, 41 losses (10.9%) C, S : 4 wins, 42 losses (8.7%) D, M : 4 wins, 45 losses (8.2%) R, S : 4 wins, 46 losses (8.0%) C, Q : 4 wins, 48 losses (7.7%) M, S : 3 wins, 42 losses (6.7%) C, O : 3 wins, 48 losses (5.9%) D, O : 2 wins, 36 losses (5.3%) D, Q : 2 wins, 36 losses (5.3%) Q, S : 2 wins, 40 losses (4.8%) M, Q : 2 wins, 40 losses (4.8%) D, R : 2 wins, 49 losses (3.9%) O, R : 1 wins, 32 losses (3.0%) C, M : 1 wins, 43 losses (2.3%) D, S : 1 wins, 46 losses (2.1%) C, D : 0 wins, 47 losses (0.0%) C, R : 0 wins, 43 losses (0.0%)
- improve win rates on heroic difficulty
- greedy agent can win ~1/1000 random 2 player heroic games :)
- idea: try DFS with greedy move selector
- idea: variable-depth (greedy?) lookahead
- pandemic strategies
- easily win on 6, no strat mentioned: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/7zk0dr/how_difficult_is_it_to_win_pandemic_with_6/
- indicates 6 is possible, some strats: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2356305/questions-pandemic-base-game-heroic-mode
- clear cubes early game, while building hands
- more players: easier to clear cubes, harder to cure. Inverse for fewer players
- read more:
- make pandemic game correct by construction? make all properties get-only
- hide command and event handlers if not hidden already. pandemic public api should make sense in terms of game rules, no internal details