Editorial: Follow-ups

The Digital Ludeme Project was a five-year ERC-funded research project, running from 2018 till 2023, and was led by Cameron Browne at Maastricht University The project’s aim was a computational study of the world’s traditional strategy games, and to improve our understanding of them by using and developing modern AI techniques. The project had many outcomes of which we highlight two. The first main outcome is Ludii, a general game system, which is able to play, test and design a wide range of games, including board games, card games, dice games, and mathematical games amongst others. Ludii has been used in our Computer Olympiads to support online tournament play. The second outcome is the training of four early career researchers, who all acquired a research position in games after the project ended. This issue shows some instances of these outcomes.

First, Cameron Browne et al. describe in Reach chess: An accidental chess variant how during routine testing of the Ludii environment the aforementioned chess variant was discovered. The second contribution, GameTable COST Action kickoff, by Éric Piette et al. reports on what can be seen as a spinoff of Digital Ludeme Project. Its junior collaborators initiated the so-called GameTable, an EU-funded international and interdisciplinary network that connects scholars and stakeholders from all career stages across academia, industry, and heritage institutions with each other. The goals of the network are (1) to inspire methodologies and applications on how to use game AI to study, reconstruct, and preserve the intangible cultural heritage of games, and (2) the empowerment of young games researchers. The first event of GameTable focused on “Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage” and took place at Leiden University from January 29th to 30th, 2024. Immediately following the event the inaugural in-person meeting for the GameTable Working Group on Search, Planning, Learning, and Explainability took place. A report of this meeting can be found in this issue as well.

This issue concludes with an activity report of the Game Informatics Research Group (GI) of the Information Processing Society of Japan. Among the events organized by the GI are the annual Game Programming Workshop and the Game AI Tournament.

Finally, there are some changes in the editorial board of the ICGA Journal. Cameron Browne has informed us that he has decided to step down. On behalf of the ICGA, I would like to thank Cameron for all his invaluable contributions to the ICGA Journal and its community. His departure has triggered us to find two replacements. The first one is Ting-Han Wei, who assisted the editorial board in the past. The second one is Jon Edwards, who is the 32nd World Correspondence Chess Champion. Besides writing regular chess columns, he has authored more than 40 chess books. We are confident that both of them will strengthen the editorial board the upcoming years. Mark Winands