Training a reinforcement-learning agent to play Baloot (and shipping it to Android)

Article automatically generated from technical news.

Baloot is a 32-card trick-taking game played in Saudi Arabia by four players in two teams: two contracts (Sun and Hokm), two bidding rounds, declarable melds called projects, doubling up to four times, and a scoring system (qaid) with rounding rules that catch even experienced players out. Building a bot that plays it well turned out to be a much bigger project than the card game itself. This is a write-up of the approach used in Arb3a Baloot (Unity client, Node.js server), which shipped on A