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…
A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play launched on February 25, 2026 with 220 votes, #127 of 16,627 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
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 abilities that frontier LLMs excel at. The game is based on the Screeps paradigm of programming-driven gameplay, allowing models like Claude to directly execute strategies through code rather than traditional game interfaces. It is built for AI researchers and enthusiasts interested in testing LLM capabilities in complex, dynamic environments.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
LLM Skirmish - An Adversarial In-Context Learning Benchmark
It's been great to see the energy in the last year around using games to evaluate LLMs. Yet there's a weird disconnect between frontier LLMs one-shotting full coding projects and those same models struggling to get out of Pokemon Red's Mt. Moon . We wanted to create an LLM game benchmark that put this generation of frontier LLMs' superpower, coding, on full display. Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps . It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." In Screeps, human players write javascript strategies that get executed in the game's environment. Players gain resources, lose territory, and have units wiped out. It's a traditional RTS, but controlled entirely…from llmskirmish.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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- SIScreeps is live at Indiegogo – the world's first MMO for programmers2014 · igg.me · ▲23
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I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each otherFeb 2026 · mage-bench.com · ▲117I'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.
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