Board Game AI Strategy

For my UF IPPD senior design project, I built an AI to play the board game "Settlers of Catan". Also, as primary author and lead AI developer won Best Paper for Simulation at IITSEC 2025.

Board Game AI Strategy

This project post details my experience working in a team to build an AI to play the board game “Settlers of Catan”. We used a novel approach of building a reinforcement learning agent from scratch, representing the game of Catan through graph neural networks, and selecting from a set of heuristic submodels. As the lead AI developer and primary author, I led the team in publishing our findings in a paper titled “Multi-Agent Board Game Strategy Through Simulation”. Our paper won Best Simulation Paper at IITSEC 2025 (a leading conference in military strategy, education, training, AI, and simulation).

I personally had the highest amount of commits (101), lines coded (5818+,2079-), and architecture design decisions (AI Lead).

The Program

The Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) program is a competitive senior design program at UF designed to bring engineering students from different majors together to complete a project over the course of a year.

Students are placed into teams of 6-7 and work on a project alongside a company sponsor in domains including: Healthcare, Renewable Energy, Defense, AI, Aerospace, and more. Student teams work with a faculty coach who provides resources and mentorship where needed and a company liaison who guides the project specifications and is the final customer for the project.

The Team

Team Tactica was my team for the UF IPPD 2425 cohort. There were a total of seven students in the team:

  • Max Banach (Electrical Engineering & Economics)
  • Andres Espinosa (Industrial & Systems Engineering)
  • Cody Flynn (Computer Science)
  • Jason Li (Statistics & Computer Science)
  • Han Mach (Computer Science)
  • Brian Magnuson (Computer Science)
  • Cathy Quan (Mathematics & Computer Science)

Our team worked alongside our company sponsor CAE USA, a leading company specializing in creating trainings and simulations for the aviation industry, and our liaison Dr. Brian Stensrud, a former UF IPPD alum himself.

It was an absolute pleasure working with each of these lovely people and I am consistently inspired by the great work that they continue to do.

The Project

I did a lot of work in this project: I architected an AI to play one of the most popular board games of all time, I led the development of this AI, I published a conference award-winning paper, I established a framework for transforming wargames into reinforcement learning environments, I contributed to open-source, and I learned a hell of a lot about what it means to be an effective collaborator, team player, and leader of others.

As Team Tactica, we worked extensively to not only develop our project, but to document every step of the way so we can ensure that our work is as easy to learn from as possible. We worked together to create a fun and educational video demonstrating what we accomplished, Brian created a weekly blog to provide progress updates, I made a short animation video to explain our project AI visually, and we created an award-winning AI research paper.

I love video games, I love research, I love creative thinking, and I love working in a team. Developing this AI to play Catan was a beautiful marriage of all of these loves. This project was an incredibly rewarding experience, and one of my favorite things to show off to others.