Training a Reinforcement Learning Agent for Tales of Tribute

Tales of Tribute is a strategic deck-building card game that presents unique challenges for artificial intelligence due to its complex action space, hidden information, and long-term planning requirements. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning agent that learns to play Tales of Tribute without relying on handcrafted heuristics. Our approach introduces a generalizable game state representation and a scalable action evaluation mechanism based on preference vectors. We train our agent using Proximal Policy Optimization within the Scripts of Tribute framework and demonstrate competitive performance against established search-based agents, including Monte Carlo Tree Search. The results validate the viability of reinforcement learning in Tales of Tribute and highlight the potential of preference-based action evaluation in domains with large and variable action spaces. Further experiments will be required to test its viability in other card games.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-08-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/cog64752.2025.11114280
Primary Topic
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Training a Reinforcement Learning Agent for Tales of Tribute

Alexander Dockhorn, Sebastian Lashmet
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
article

Training a Reinforcement Learning Agent for Tales of Tribute

Alexander Dockhorn, Sebastian Lashmet
article en

Abstract

Tales of Tribute is a strategic deck-building card game that presents unique challenges for artificial intelligence due to its complex action space, hidden information, and long-term planning requirements. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning agent that learns to play Tales of Tribute without relying on handcrafted heuristics. Our approach introduces a generalizable game state representation and a scalable action evaluation mechanism based on preference vectors. We train our agent using Proximal Policy Optimization within the Scripts of Tribute framework and demonstrate competitive performance against established search-based agents, including Monte Carlo Tree Search. The results validate the viability of reinforcement learning in Tales of Tribute and highlight the potential of preference-based action evaluation in domains with large and variable action spaces. Further experiments will be required to test its viability in other card games.

Leibniz University Hannover (DE), OSRAM (United States) (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 89%
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
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