This project was inspired by me having too much Codex budget and not enough project.

I set out to do two things: 1. Make a meaningful contribution to a game I like 2. 100% vibe a project (not look at the code, ever). I'd never actually done that before.

Given (2), I definitely wanted to make my own thing rather than pollute the PRs of any open-source maintainer.

After exploring some options I settled on making a really fast engine for Splendor. If you're not familiar with Splendor, it's a resource acquisition board game where you collect gems and spend them to make it easier to buy even more gems. There were a few Splendor bot projects out there, but not really any dedicated fast base engine for playing the game. Having a fast engine is broadly useful for playing, simulating, analyzing, and training.

Then, having built the engine more quickly than anticipated, I figured I might as well use the remaining budget to train a bot.

You can play against the bot here: https://splendorust.pages.dev/

I'm not fully sure if the bot is superhuman or not, but it does decisively beat the best open-weights Splendor [bot](https://github.com/lyquentxy/splendor) I could find. I suspect that [this one](https://github.com/inhabae/AhinLendor) is stronger than my bot but it's not open-weights. There's no dedicated bot vs. bot arena online — maybe that could be a fun future project.