Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) Rules Assistant

An experiment: Can an AI model accurately and cost-effectively answer rules questions for a tabletop wargame with a 1M+ token rulebook? Built on OpenAI's Responses API.

Try the Demo View Eval Results

The Domain Challenge

Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) is a tactical WWII board game that historically was played on cardboard maps with cardboard counters and dice.

Now most play happens digitally via VASSAL/VASL, but the platform only handles moving counters and rolling dice — all rules interpretation and calculation is still done entirely by the players.

During a game, players frequently refer to the 716-page rule book and tables for two purposes:

  1. Rule lookup: answer a question about the rules that doesn't require a calculation (e.g., "What is the movement cost to enter a woods hex?")
  2. Outcome calculation: given the game state, determine the dice roll (DR) needed to achieve an effect (e.g., "What DR do I need to break that squad given this terrain and fire modifier?")

This assistant is designed to cost-effectively support both use cases.

Features

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

Retrieve relevant rulebook chunks and generate grounded answers with citations.

Citation Verification

User can verify answers against linked source passages from rulebook.

LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Automatically score responses against expected answers using structured evaluation criteria.

Data Curation & Feedback Loop

Curate high-quality Q&A pairs into eval datasets and training corpora to improve the system.

Multimodal

Attach a board screenshot to ask questions about a specific game situation, grounded in cited rules.

Demo

Live demo showing a rules question, RAG retrieval, and cited response with PDF navigation.

Advanced Squad Leader is a trademark of Avalon Hill Games, Inc. This is a personal, non-commercial project with no affiliation with Hasbro, Avalon Hill, or Multi-Man Publishing.