# AutoTavern Builds a Hearthstone Bot That Tops Leaderboard Stats

> Researchers say their agent reached a 1.60 average placement and 80% first places in its last 20 games, beating the leaderboard’s top 10 players on those measures.

Oossa · 2026-10-27 · https://oossa.com/en/autotavern-builds-a-hearthstone-bot-that-tops-leaderboard-stats

Researchers behind AutoTavern say their system built a Hearthstone Battlegrounds simulator and a bot that can play full games on the live ladder. Over 20 days, it produced 23 versions of TavernAgent, trained against simulated opponents calibrated to real games.

The paper reports that the bot’s last 20 leaderboard records averaged 1.60 placement, with 80% first places, compared with 2.34 and 59% for the server’s ten highest-rated players. The team says it plans to open-source its TavernGym simulator and TavernBench, a 960-task benchmark; no release date is given.

## The facts

- The researchers report TavernAgent reached a rating of about 15,000, up from 6,000.
- On TavernBench play tasks, TavernAgent answered 91%; frontier LLMs scored at most 63%, according to the paper.

## Why it matters

When TavernGym and TavernBench are released, game-AI researchers will have a simulator and test suite for measuring agents on Battlegrounds; the paper does not say when they will be available.

## Sources & references

1. [Build, Don't Play: Self-Improving LLM Research Agents Develop a Hearthstone Battlegrounds AI That Rivals Top Players](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33845) – arXiv cs.MA, 2026-10-27

Last updated: 2026-10-27