Cameron's Yavalath Page

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2025-01-19 02:00:19

Yavalath is an abstract board game for two or three players, invented by a computer program called LUDI. It has an easy rule set that any player can pick up immediately, but which produces surprisingly tricky emergent play.

Yavalath is available from nestorgames, making it the first — and still only — computer-generated game to be commercially published, together with its sister game Pentalath.

In October 2011, Yavalath was ranked in the top #100 abstract board games ever invented on the BoardGameGeek database. This helped it win the GECCO "Humies" gold medal for human-competitive results in evolutionary computation for 2012.

Win by making a line-of-4 (or more) pieces of your colour. Lose by making a line-of-3 pieces of your colour beforehand. Draw if the board otherwise fills up.

The key tactical play in Yavalath is the forcing move, as shown below. White move 1 forces Black to lose with the blocking move 2.