Legends of Code and Magic (LOCM) is a small implementation of a Strategy Card Game, designed to perform AI research. Its advantage over the real cardgame AI engines is that it is much simpler to handle by the agents, and thus allows testing more sophisticated algorithms and quickly implement theoretical ideas.
All cards effects are deterministic, thus the nondeterminism is introduced only by the ordering of cards and unknown opponent's deck. The game board consists of two lines (similarly as in TES:Legends), so it favors deeper strategic thinking. Also, LOCM is based on the fair arena mode, i.e., before every game, both players create their decks secretly from the symmetrical yet limited choices. Because of that, the deckbuilding is dynamic and cannot be simply reduced to using human-created top-meta decks.
This competition aims to play the same role for Hearthstone AI Competition as microRTS plays for various StarCraft AI contests. Encourage advanced research, free of drawbacks of working with the full-fledged game. In this domain, it means i.a. embedding deckbuilding into the game itself (limiting the usage of premade decks), and allowing efficient search beyond the one turn depth.
The contest is based on the LOCM 1.2, the same as in CEC and COG 2019 Competition. One-lane, 1.0 version of the game, has been used for CodinGame contest in August 2018.
