It’s not very often that life imitates art in a way that feels ridiculously fitting, but this case is certainly it. On Choombattler, a fan-developed online simulator for the Cyberpunk TCG, one player had created a bot that has been dominating the leaderboards. But instead of banning it, the developers behind the online sim have turned it into a boss—and it's going about as well as you’d expect.
It’s no longer on the leaderboards, with a disclaimer on the profile confirming it is a bot, not a human player. However, when clicking ‘Play’ on the fan-made Choombattler Cyberpunk TCG simulator, a big box comes up identifying it as a bot. Currently, it has won 6,999 matches out of a total of 7,202, at the time of writing (the figures changed multiple times as I wrote), earning it a 97.2% win rate. By the time this is published, it has likely gone higher.
Of course, the idea of a bot plaguing players’ win rates has likely led some people to assume that it is cheating. However, according to the developer of Choombattler in a Reddit post, that’s not the case. “It connects like any other player. Our server only sends it what it's allowed to see: never your hand, your deck, or your face-down Legends,” u/ChoomBattler writes. They also confirmed that the bot “taught itself the game by playing millions of games against itself, using ideas borrowed from AlphaGo. It never trained on ChoomBattler data, not even the games it played on the site.”
This has led to plenty of discussion on the Reddit post sharing ‘The Rogue AI’. Mostly, it’s people attempting to defeat the ‘boss’ of Choombattler, no doubt increasing its wins while also hoping to take down its legendary win rate. However, with the wins continuing to ramp up, calling it The Rogue AI doesn’t seem as fitting anymore—instead, a fitting name would be ‘Adam Smasher’ at this point.
However, if you’re courageous enough and you do end up winning against the bot, you’ll earn the coveted Beat the Rogue AI badge for your Choombattler profile. And, likely, bragging rights—you may as well head to those Cyberpunk TCG events with your decked-out Welcome to Night City chase cards and start netting those winner promos while you can. I tried to beat it, but I lost so many times that I now believe we’re in a cyberpunk dystopia already.
You don’t need to beat The Rogue AI for a prize, though—my newsletter is free and gives you a weekly roundup of TCG news, including the Cyberpunk TCG and Pokémon TCG. So, make sure to sign up.
