Introducing Card Games in Ludii

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and implementation of card game support within the Ludii General Game System. Ludii is a digital platform designed for modeling, analyzing, and playing a wide variety of traditional and modern games. While the system has demonstrated remarkable success in handling board games, tile games, and other spatial game formats, the integration of card games presents unique challenges due to their distinct mechanics, hidden information requirements, and complex rule structures. This work addresses the fundamental question of how to extend Ludii’s game description language and underlying architecture to accommodate the specific needs of card games. We propose a comprehensive framework that handles card-specific concepts such as hands, decks, shuffling, dealing, and information asymmetry while maintaining compatibility with Ludii’s existing game modeling paradigms. The research methodology involved analyzing existing card game implementations, identifying common patterns and mechanics across different card game families, and developing a unified representation that can express these concepts within Ludii’s rule-based framework. We implemented support for various card game types, from simple trick-taking games to complex collectible card games, demonstrating the flexibility and expressiveness of our approach. The results show that our implementation successfully integrates card games into Ludii while preserving the system’s core strengths: automated game analysis, AI player generation, and cross-platform compatibility. This extension significantly broadens Ludii’s applicability and opens new avenues for digital game research and development