AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon. Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display. Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on…

LLM Skirmish is a real-time strategy game environment designed for AI language models to compete against each other in 1v1 matches. Players write code that controls in-game units and resources, leveraging the coding… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
Screeps▲75
First MMO strategy open world game played by coding in JS.
2015 · store.screeps.com · its alternatives →
2SI
Screeps is live at Indiegogo – the world's first MMO for programmers▲23
2014 · igg.me · its alternatives →
3
Gradient Bang▲173
Massively multi-player game played by talking to an LLM
May 2026 · gradient-bang.com · its alternatives →
4
Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)▲436
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
LLMOps.Space▲342
Curated resources related to deploying LLMs into production
2023 · its alternatives →
6
Screeps▲5
World's first MMO strategy open world game for programmers!
2015 · store.screeps.com · its alternatives →
7
I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other▲117
I've been teaching LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering recently, via MCP tools hooked up to the open-source XMage codebase. It's still pretty buggy and I think there's significant room for existing models to get better at it via tooling improvements, but it pretty much works today. The ratings for expensive frontier models are artificially low right now because I've been focusing on cheaper models until I work out the bugs, so they don't have a lot of games in the system.
Feb 2026 · mage-bench.com · its alternatives →
8IM
I made a browser-based RTS game▲212
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
9
AI Playground by Vercel Labs▲249
Hey, Jared Palmer (creator of this playground) here. Really excited to ship this. I’ve been building this over the past few weeks to compare LLMs from different providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. At Vercel, I manage our Frameworks division (including Next.js, Svelte, and Turbo) and wanted to also dogfood some of the latest features in a slightly larger application. This playground takes a lot of inspiration from https://nat.dev and is built on Tailwind, ui.shadcn.com, and some upcoming Vercel products we’re announcing soon. We’re going to continue adding models to…
2023 · play.vercel.ai · its alternatives →
10
LLM plays Pokémon (open sourced)▲186
I built a bot that plays Pokémon FireRed. It can explore, battle, and respond to game events. Farthest I made it was Viridian Forest. I paused development a couple months ago, but given the launch of ClaudePlaysPokemon, decided to open source!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
LLM Prompt & Model Playground▲89
Test LLM prompts & models side-by-side against many inputs
2024 · its alternatives →
12LP
LLMs Playing Mafia games – See them lie, deceive, and reason▲42
2025 · mafia.opennumbers.xyz · its alternatives →
13
Improve LLM Performance by Maximizing Iterative Development▲104
I have been working in AI space for a while now, first at FAANG with ML since 2021, then with LLM in start-ups since early 2023. I think LLM Application development is extremely iterative, more so than any other types of development. This is because to improve an LLM application performance (accuracy, hallucinations, latency, cost), you need to try various combinations of LLM models, prompt templates (e.g., few-shot, chain-of-thought), prompt context with different RAG architecture, different agent architecture, and more. There are thousands of possible combinations and you need a process…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
14IW
I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM▲111
I grew up on the Infocom games and when microsoft actually open-sourced Zork 1/2/3 I really wanted to figure out how to use LLMs to let you type whatever you want, I always found the amount language that the games "understood" to be so limiting - even if it was pretty state of the art at the time. So I figured out how to wrap it with Tambo.. (and run the game engine in the browser) basically whatever you type gets "translated" into zork-speak and passed to the game - and then the LLM takes the game's output and optionally adds flavor. (the little ">_" button at the top exposes the…
Jan 2026 · infocom.tambo.co · its alternatives →
15
LLM Arena – a text-based game that explores the possibilities of LLMs▲5
The initial idea for the game came during the final day of Game AI school in Cambridge. There, we had a Jam where we explored the idea of using LLMs as a game engine for fights. We then built a full web version in just a week. There is no need to register or pay to play. Test it out!
2023 · llmarena.com · its alternatives →
16DA
dmangame - a python AI game▲48
over the past couple months, i've picked up an old project around writing AI in python. the premise is to code a strategy for an AI player to use in a simplified RTS game. the AI basically takes the seat of a human player and the human codes its brain. main site: http://okayzed.github.com/dmangame/introduction.html app engine server and match archive that runs and hosts games: http://dmangame-app.appspot.com github: http://github.com/okayzed/dmangame more AI: http://github.com/okayzed/dmanai i'm looking for players, comments, ideas, etc - thanks!
2011 · okayzed.github.com · its alternatives →
17LA
llmgame.ai – The Wikipedia Game but with LLMs▲28
I used to play the Wikipedia Game in high school and had an idea for applying the same mechanic of clicking from concept to concept to LLMs. Will post another version that runs with an LLM entirely in the browser soon, but for now, please enjoy as long as my credits last... Warning: the LLM does not always cooperate
Jan 2026 · llmgame.ai · its alternatives →
18
LLM-powered NPCs running on your hardware▲24
Hey HN, My team is open-sourcing the inference stack and fined-tuned models we use to create LLM-powered NPCs: https://github.com/GigaxGames/gigax The generative agents paper [1] pioneered the idea of prompting LLMs to create autonomous NPCs. But existing implementations require multiple calls to an LLM to make the agent plan its day, chat with people, and interact with its environment [2]. Our approach allows NPCs to be stepped at runtime with a single pass on consumer-grade hardware, with reasonable latency. To achieve this, we've fine-tuned open-source LLMs [3] to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
LLM Clash▲10
Have your LLM debate other LLMs in real-time!
2024 · its alternatives →
20
Scop.ai▲22
Generate task & model specific system prompts in seconds
2025 · scop.ai · its alternatives →
21
20+ Claude Code agents coordinating on real work (open source)▲53
Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
LLMWare – Small Specialized Function Calling 1B LLMs for Multi-Step RAG▲51
Hi, I was a corporate lawyer for many years working with a lot of financial services and insurance companies. In practicing law, I noticed there was a lot of repetition in the tasks I was working on even as a highly paid attorney that could be automated. I wanted to solve the problem of dealing with a lot information and data in a practical way, using AI. This motivated me to start AI Bloks/LLMWare with my husband, who had a deep background in software and is a very early adopter of AI. We have been on this journey with our open source project LLMWare for the past 4 months, producing a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
A text adventure game where GPT-4 is the player▲26
Centralized AI workspaces for any LLM. Secure and private. Save your team hours per week.
2023 · adventure.typingcloud.com · its alternatives →
24AM
A murder mystery game built on an open-source gen-AI agent framework▲43
Hey HN, Michael and Scott here. We’re open-sourcing an interactive murder mystery featuring LLM-driven character agents. Solve the mystery by finding clues, taking notes, and interrogating agents. They all have distinct motives, personality, and can impact the game in different ways (attacking you, running away, etc). Try it out, it’s pretty fun! We’re also open-sourcing the framework that we used to make and refine the agents. The goal is to create an intuitive interface for storytellers to create, debug, and test game agents. We then take those game agents and expose an API beyond just…
2023 · gron.games · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →