Software Challenge Germany is a national programming competition organized by CAU Kiel. Each year, a different board game is announced and over 60 teams from across Germany write an agent to play it. The game changes every season, so the interesting problem is building search infrastructure that carries over rather than starting from scratch each time.
I competed in two seasons together with Jonas Pohlmann, whom I met through the GamesTalente academy. In 2021 the game was Blokus, where we finished second nationally. In 2022 the game was Ostsee-Schach, a board game with chess-like aesthetics but fundamentally different rules, where we finished fourth. We wrote our agents in Rust using techniques from chess programming: alpha-beta search, iterative deepening, transposition tables, and tuned evaluation functions.