A New Challenge: Approaching Tetris Link with AI

Decades of research have been invested in making computer programs for playing games such as Chess and Go. This paper introduces a board game, Tetris Link, that is yet unexplored and appears to be highly challenging. Tetris Link has a large branching factor and lines of play that can be very deceptive, that search has a hard time uncovering. Finding good moves is very difficult for a computer player, our experiments show. We explore heuristic planning and two other approaches: Reinforcement Learning and Monte Carlo tree search. Curiously, a naive heuristic approach that is fueled by expert knowledge is still stronger than the planning and learning approaches. We, therefore, presume that Tetris Link is more difficult than expected. We offer our findings to the community as a challenge to improve upon.