Competitions at IEEE CoG 2026
- Tales of Tribute AI Competition
- BotPrize Unity Human-Like AI challenge
- GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
- Codenames AI Competition
- The Tabletop Games Balancing Competition
- 2026 DareFightingICE LLM AI Competition
- 2026 DareFightingICE Sound Design Competition
- Battlesnake Blackout 2026
- VGC AI Competition 4th Edition
Tales of Tribute AI Competition
The Tales of Tribute AI Competition invites researchers and developers to tackle the strategic complexities of the deckbuilding game from The Elder Scrolls Online. Unlike traditional CCGs, players build their decks mid-game from a shared pool, requiring a balance between long-term planning and real-time adaptiveness to handle environmental randomness.
Important Deadlines
- Submission deadline: 10th August 2026
- Results announcement: During CoG 2026 competition session
https://github.com/ScriptsOfTribute
BotPrize Unity Human-Like AI challenge
The BotPrize competition challenges programmers / researchers / hobbyists to create a bot for Unity FPS game (a first-person shooter) that can fool opponents into thinking it is another human player. In the competition gaming environment, both computer-controlled bots and human players (judges) meet in multiple rounds of combat, and the judges try to guess which opponents are human. To win the prize, a bot has to be indistinguishable from a human player. In other words, it has to pass this adapted version of the Turing Test.
Important Deadlines
- Registration open till: 31th March 2026
- Submission of an approach deadline: 31th June 2026
- Evaluation phase: July 2026
- Results announcement: During CoG 2026 competition session
- Finalists announced in advance to encourage attendance
https://botprize2026.ai2.upv.es/
GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
The Settlement Generation Challenge is about writing an algorithm that can create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. The challenge is to produce an algorithm that is adaptive towards the provided map, creates a settlement that satisfies a range of functional requirements, but also looks good and evokes an interesting narrative. The goal is to produce an algorithm that can rival the state of the art of what humans can produce. Any form of AI approach is allowed, and the competition provides a framework to get started. The resulting settlements will be evaluated by human judges.
- Deadline: 1st of July, 2026
https://gendesignmc.wikidot.com/
https://youtu.be/opvVnpyiMmA?si=CDAmC02MPISXCJ7g
Codenames AI Competition
The Codenames AI competition challenges LLM-based agents to cooperate as a team to play the popular word association game Codenames. Agents must collaborate as a team together to identify a set of partially known words on a provided board as quickly as possible by utilising word association clues. Codenames provides an interesting challenge for AI agents, requiring both a sophisticated understanding of language, theory of mind, and strategic reasoning capabilities in order to play well.
- Registration Deadline: 4 August 2026
- Submission for Testing Deadline: 11 August 2026
- Final Submission Deadline: 18 August 2026
https://github.com/stepmat/Codenames_GPT
The Tabletop Games Balancing Competition
Use AI to balance games better! Develop an optimisation algorithm able to balance multiple games (from our Tabletop Games Framework) at once in a programming language-agnostic competition. Compete and see how your program does and compare it to other entries in our live updating leaderboard!
- Submissions Close: 25th August 2026
https://balance-competition.tabletopgames.ai
2026 DareFightingICE LLM AI Competition
The 2026 DareFightingICE LLM AI Competition challenges participants to develop real-time fighting game agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional competitions that rely on custom algorithms or reinforcement learning, this event restricts participants to using prompt engineering or model fine-tuning (with models up to 7B parameters) to control agents within the DareFightingICE platform.
- Midterm: June 7, 2026 (AoE)
- Final: August 7, 2026 (AoE)
Homepage: https://bit.ly/D-ICE-AIC
Video: https://tinyurl.com/DFICE-AIC
2026 DareFightingICE Sound Design Competition
Can you play a fighting game using audio alone? The 2026 DareFightingICE Sound Design Competition invites students, researchers, and developers to answer this by creating immersive and inclusive soundscapes that enable audio-only gameplay. Whether utilizing our provided AI tools, traditional manual engineering, or a hybrid approach, you have total creative freedom to craft the ultimate audio experience. This is the first competition of its kind, featuring a cutting-edge evaluation pipeline where large audio models judge aesthetics, and Blind AI agents test functional utility by playing the game using only your audio. Join us at IEEE CoG 2026 to push the boundaries of inclusive game design and AI research.
- Midterm: June 7, 2026 (AoE)
- Final: August 7, 2026 (AoE)
Homepage: http://bit.ly/D-ICE-SDC
Video: https://tinyurl.com/DFICE-SDC
Battlesnake Blackout 2026
The Battlesnake Blackout competition invites you to tackle the multiplayer game Battlesnake. In this grid-based game, players control a snake with the goal of surviving and eliminating opponents to be the last one standing. Additionally, this competition introduces a fog of war mechanic where agents must act under imperfect information, perceiving only the immediate area surrounding their snake's head. This modification significantly elevates the game's complexity, requiring participants to develop algorithms capable of opponent modeling, trap setting, and long-term strategic planning under uncertainty. Participants will utilize a client-server architecture to host their own agents, which communicate with an evaluation host to send their next move. By combining simple rules with a high skill ceiling, Battlesnake Blackout aims to serve as both an accessible educational platform and a rigorous benchmark for research in multi-agent systems and game theory.
Important Deadlines
- First phase starts: July 7th, 2026
- First phase ends: July 27th, 2026
- Second phase (Tournament): July 29th, 2026
Homepage: Competition website will be published later
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btR0c2C2JV0
Discord: https://discord.gg/JXW9x4hQXp
VGC AI Competition 4th Edition
The VGC AI Competition is an Esports-style simulation of the Pokemon Video Game Championships, where AI agents battle and build teams strategically. Agents must master both combat and team construction using only historical data from past competitions, while meta-balancing agents tweak Pokemon stats to promote diversity and fair play. The competition features three main tracks:
- Battle Track: Agents pilot given teams under generalized numerical rules.
- Championship Track: Agents design adaptive teams to counter predicted opponents, now incorporating meta-game insights.
- Balance Track (Meta + Rule): Agents modify Pokemon attributes and game mechanics to meet predefined balance goals.
Important Deadlines
- Competition starts: February 9th, 2025
- Submission deadline: July 13th, 2025
- Result announcement: August 1st, 2025
Homepage: https://gitlab.com/DracoStriker/pokemon-vgc-engine/-/wikis/home
Video: https://youtu.be/z4OzOSSyAj0
Discord: https://discord.gg/GwKHqXpdjf
