Introducing Tales of Tribute AI Competition

This paper presents a new AI challenge, the Tales of Tribute AI Competition (TOTAIC), based on a two-player deck-building card game released with the High Isle chapter of The Elder Scrolls Online. Currently, there is no other AI competition covering Collectible Card Games (CCG) genre, and there has never been one that targets a deck-building game. Thus, apart from usual CCG-related obstacles to overcome, like randomness, hidden information, and large branching factor, the successful approach additionally requires long-term planning and versatility. The game can be tackled with multiple approaches, including classic adversarial search, single-player planning, and Neural Networks-based algorithms. This paper introduces the competition framework, describes the rules of the game, and presents the results of a tournament between sample AI agents. The first edition of TOTAIC is hosted at the IEEE Conference on Games 2023.