It does feel like the kind of game that a NN would do well at. Perhaps NN rollouts combined with MCTS. Does this use the 40th anniversary rules?
Tempted as I am to play around with such code, I'm having too much fun just playing the game myself. I did make a MCTS bot to train against, and it easily solves the short-term problems, but it doesn't see the big picture. It just optimizes for the maximum worm reward of the turn. There's more to this game than that.
A NN could learn bigger-picture rules like when to play risky, and when to play for the steal, and evaluate just how good having that 4-worm tile really is when there's a 20% chance you lose it next turn. I wonder what sorts of environment variables it would find most useful.
