Alquerque

Description

Alquerque is an environment for evaluating agents on playing Alquerque, an ancient board game and precursor to checkers, against an LLM opponent. This environment wraps the Alquerque implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Strategic board game reasoning with piece movement and capture mechanics
• Multi-step planning to capture opponent pieces or block their moves
• Spatial reasoning on a 5x5 grid with diagonal connections
• Competitive two-player gameplay against an LLM opponent

Compute Requirements

Alquerque does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (150 tasks) and test (150 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 3 variants:

• Alquerque-v0
• Alquerque-v0-raw
• Alquerque-v0-train

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given a single tool:

• move_piece(from_pos, to_pos): Make a move in Alquerque.

Args:
from_pos: Starting position (e.g., 'a1' or '0')
to_pos: Target position (e.g., 'a2' or '1')

Time Horizon

Alquerque is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Medium

Other Environment Requirements

This environment requires an OpenAI API key (passed via secrets) to power the LLM opponent.

Safety

Agents in Alquerque interact only with a strategic board game and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}