The Routing Game Game

The Routing Game Game, inspired by the topic of congestion games, is a three-player game meant to simulate the (perhaps surprisingly unintuitive) challenge of planning transportation systems for strategic, learning travelers.

The game is currently around 300 lines of Python code and only allows text inputs. I'm hoping (read: planning) on rewriting the game in JavaScript, but in the meantime feel free to reach out if you're interested in the code :)

The game takes place over 8 rounds. Two players are designated as the travelers. They are tasked with selecting a route from the starting node (0) to the end node (24) that minimizes their travel cost at the end of the 8th round. However, they only learn a given edge cost after they have traversed that edge in a previous round. Importantly, travelers experience congestion effects (i.e., a doubled edge cost) if they both traverse the same edge in a round. Travelers are not allowed to coordinate or see the other traveler's route choice.

A third player is designated as the planner. They are tasked with minimizing the final total travel cost for the two travelers. The planner can see all edge costs as well as the route choices of the travelers in the previous round. In each round, they can choose to (a) construct a new diagonal edge, (b) remove an edge, or (c) leave the network as it is.