Do you know how Garry Kasparov felt when he faced Deep Blue? Well, now you can!

PoIAna

Briscola is a wildly popular card game in Italy, with very simple rules (for which you can find an explanation in-game). PoIAna allows you to play against a multitude of different AI agents, each one of them with different difficulties and playing styles. Try to beat them all!

The game is powered by the FOSS Godot game engine while the models are loaded through the ONNX runtime.

How did you make these models?

These models were trained together with my CS colleague using some off-the-shelf Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms. If you are curious about the training process you can find more details on my GitHub profile.

If you are not, do not worry! You can play the game without knowing any of this stuff.

What about the name? "Poiana"?

I'm glad you asked!

"Poiana" is a dialectal term used in northern Italy to denote the strongest card in the game, the "ace of briscola".

Setup

Simply unzip the content of the downloaded archive to a location of your choice and start the application. No setup is required.

On Windows it is possible that Microsoft Defender Smartscreen shows a warning when launching the game for the first time. You can safely ignore this warning, but if you are suspicious you can always look into the published source code and either download one of the automated releases or build the game yourself with the Godot engine.