Ludii General Game System for Modeling, Analyzing, and Designing Board Games

The Ludii computer program is a complete general game system for digitally modeling, analyzing, and designing a wide range of games. These include traditional tabletop games such as board games and dice games, in addition to card games, graph games, mathematical games, puzzles, simulations, and simple video games. Ludii supports stochastic (chance) elements, hidden information, adversarial and cooperative modes of play, and any number of players from 1 to 16.

The system differs from existing general game playing (GGP) programs in a number of ways. Its underlying ludemic model allows a wider range of games to be described more easily and succinctly than other approaches, and it is intended as a tool for game design as much as game playing. Ludii belongs the “hybrid” class of GGP approaches that allows extensible higher-level game descriptions (Kowalksi et al. 2020).