Board Game Arena

I agree with Oz. I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.

With respect to Azul, there are two types of AI assistance we're currently seeing:

a) AI-assisted players: People using AI to help make decisions during their own games. Unfortunately, I don't think there's much BGA can realistically do to prevent this.

b) Fully automated bots: AI systems that simulate human players and play games without human involvement.

From what we've seen in our Discord community, many of the people developing these bots appear to be doing so for academic or research purposes. BGA provides a convenient platform for testing their bots against real players and measuring their strength.

Unfortunately, some of these projects are open source or implemented in readily accessible JavaScript, making them easy for others to adopt or modify. I suspect this is contributing to the increasing number of bots we're seeing.

If BGA wants to tackle this problem, I think there are several practical measures worth considering.

1) Introduce a suspected AI usage flag: Allow players to privately flag opponents they suspect of using AI. Multiple independent flags could help BGA identify suspicious accounts and prioritise investigations. These flags should not be publicly visible or automatically result in sanctions.

2) Improve reporting mechanism: Provide a clearly identified mechanism for reporting suspected AI or bot assistance, directly linked to the game concerned.

3) Introduce proactive analysis: Automatically analyse high-ranking Arena players and rapidly advancing accounts for suspicious patterns of AI-assisted play, using AI to lighten the human impact.

4) Empower trusted game specialists: Recruit experienced and respected community members to assist existing moderators with investigating suspected AI cheating. BGA staff are unlikely to have the resources or game-specific expertise to investigate every case. Individuals such as Oz in Heat and Prip in Azul are deeply committed to their respective communities and have earned considerable trust. These specialists could help review evidence and recommend temporary suspensions or the invalidation of results, subject to safeguards.

These final two suggestions are specifically aimed at fully automated bots rather than players using AI assistance, and may be a little extreme.

5) Introduce player-requested bot challenges: Allow players in high-ranking Arena games to request a CAPTCHA or equivalent human-verification challenge once per opponent per game.

6) Allow switching to turn-based play: Give players a limited number of jokers per Arena season to convert a live game into a turn-based game. From what we've seen, current bots appear to be designed for real-time play and may not support turn-based games. This could provide another way to disrupt automated play.

I appreciate that none of these measures would completely eliminate cheating. The situation is only likely to become more difficult as AI engines improve and become more accessible. Like others, I think BGA needs to start addressing it more proactively.

tbhp wrote: ↑18 October 2026, 23:57 It reminds me of when I was in school and we had to create a program that would pilot the trajectory of a car in a virtual race. At the end of the semester, all the bots played the race in class and we could see at what position our car would finish (some cars didn't even finish).

It can be a cool thing to do if the goal is to see who is the best at designing some kind of program. But if you aren't even competing against other people's programs, then what is the point.

Organizing dedicated bot tournaments (like TCEC in chess) might be an interesting way of dealing with bots vs human issues. Maybe some will be encouraged by a new challenge (there definitely will still be people who will cheat for the sake of cheating, but not that you can do much about it).
At the very least high-level engine games like that might be something to watch and learn from.

buv3x wrote: ↑19 October 2026, 10:54 Organizing dedicated bot tournaments (like TCEC in chess) might be an interesting way of dealing with bots vs human issues. Maybe some will be encouraged by a new challenge (there definitely will still be people who will cheat for the sake of cheating, but not that you can do much about it).
At the very least high-level engine games like that might be something to watch and learn from.

That would be cool if there were venues for people who enjoy bots vs bots competitions. Some of the pro-bots users on here seem genuinely interested in the programming and performance aspects.

Unfortunately, I fear there's also many people who are just trying to stir things up in competitions made for humans. This creates a problem that goes even beyond regular cheating, because traditionally people who cheated were people who weren't very good at a game, so they could be nuisance but ultimately you wouldn't see them in the later stages of a competition. But now if people can cheat with bots that can beat anyone, this has a huge effect on the result of the competition. How do we fight against that?

Pigeon’s post is amazing

BGA has to do something here… Azul may be the only significantly impacted game so far but we are probably only a few months to a year away from bots being in every game to some extent.

Anybody have experience in getting their (BGA devs etc) attention? Tickets have been raised many times to no effect so far.