Strands (2022)

Strands is a 2 player puzzle game designed with help from artificial intelligence.

The players take turns placing pieces on a hexagonal board, each trying to create the largest connected group. On your turn, you choose one of the numbers on the board and cover up that many instances of it: for example, covering three empty "3" spaces. When the board is full, the player with the largest connected group wins. (In case of a tie for largest group, compare the players' second largest groups, and so on.)

The board's center is the most powerful place to put pieces, but you can place more pieces per turn near the edge. You must navigate this tradeoff to win.

An AI was used to determine how many pieces you can place on each region of the board, so all regions are balanced. The AI used was called a Monte Carlo Tree Search. By having it play many games against itself on each of many different boards, it was possible to determine which boards were most balanced for the AI. Specifically, it was possible to quantify the likelihood that the AI would place a stone on each space, at each stage of the game. This was used to identify the boards where those likelihoods were most evenly distributed across spaces at each stage.