Authors:
Mark Goadrich, Achille Morenville, Eric Piette

Venue:
Computer and Games (CG), 2026 (accepted)

Topics:
imperfect-information games, card games, benchmarking, general game playing, RECYCLE

Links: PDF · arXiv

This paper introduces Valet, a standardized testbed of twenty-one traditional imperfect-information card games designed to support comparative research on game-playing algorithms and game systems.

The games cover a broad range of genres, cultural origins, player counts, deck structures, mechanics, winning conditions, and methods of hiding and revealing information. To ensure consistency across systems, all games are encoded in the RECYCLE card game description language.

The paper also provides empirical characterizations of the games, including branching factor, game length, and score distributions, demonstrating the suitability of Valet as a diverse and reproducible benchmarking suite for imperfect-information game AI.

Research on imperfect-information game AI is often evaluated on only a small number of games, making it difficult to determine whether observed results generalize beyond a few selected domains.

Valet addresses this issue by providing a shared benchmark suite of traditional card games with standardized rule encodings, enabling more robust and reproducible comparisons between algorithms and systems. The testbed also supports the construction of taxonomies of games based on mechanics, information structure, and complexity.

More broadly, this work complements research on general game playing and imperfect-information reasoning by supplying a common experimental foundation for studying uncertainty, inference, and strategic adaptation in card games.

Goadrich, M., Morenville, A., Piette, E. (2026). Valet: A Standardized Testbed of Traditional Imperfect-Information Card Games. Computer and Games (CG). Accepted.

@inproceedings{goadrich2026valet,
  author    = {Goadrich, Mark and Morenville, Achille and Piette, Eric},
  title     = {Valet: A Standardized Testbed of Traditional Imperfect-Information Card Games},
  booktitle = {Computer and Games (CG)},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Accepted},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03252}
}