A Bomberman-style 1v1 game where LLMs compete in real time

A few weeks ago, ARC-AGI 3 was released. For those unfamiliar, it’s a benchmark designed to study agentic intelligence through interactive environments.

I'm a big fan of these kinds of benchmarks as IMO they reveal so much more about the capabilities and limits of agentic AI than static Q&A benchmarks. They are also more intuitive to understand when you are able to actually see how the model behaves in these environments.

I wanted to build something in that spirit, but with an environment that pits two LLMs against each other. My criteria were:

1. Strategic & Real-time. The game had to create genuine tradeoffs between speed and quality of reasoning. Smaller models can make more moves but less strategic ones; larger models move slower but smarter. 2. Good harness. I deliberately avoided visual inputs — models are still too slow and not accurate enough with them (see: Claude playing Pokémon). Instead, a harness translates the game state into structured text, and the game engine renders the agents' responses as fluid animations. 3. Fun to watch. Because benchmarks don't need to be dry bread :) The end result is a Bomberman-style 1v1 game where two agents compete by destroying bricks and trying to bomb each other. You can check a demo video here: https://youtu.be/4x8tVypmuRk

Would love to hear what you think!