DEAL THE AGI
WITH
THE ULTIMATE (AND PROBABLY ONLY) AI CONFERENCE SUBMISSION CARD GAME
Thrown cards
CLICK HERE TO
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST

Welcome to Rebuttal!, the high-stakes world of AI conference submissions, where the line between success and rejection is razor-thin. As a researcher in this cutthroat battlefield, your goal is simple: eliminate your rivals by rejecting their submissions, before they do the same to you.

Assume the role of either the Distinguished Engineer, a Tech Lead, an Individual Contributor or an Intern, while you counter rejections with a well-timed rebuttal, navigate scathing closedreview.net criticisms, and pray your submissions don't succumb to an untimely compute failure.

I would love to make a version of Rebuttal! available to the AI community, and am hoping that with enough interest, mass production of Rebuttal! becomes viable. I have produced a first version, which you can check out below.
Rejection! and Rebuttal! cards

Rejection! cards are your main way of attacking other players! Play one to target a rival's submission and threaten its acceptance. But all hope isn't lost: the defending player can immediately counter with a Rebuttal! card, cancelling the Rejection! entirely and keeping their submission in the game.

Conference peer review has never been more personal.

Criticism cards, sourced straight from the depths of ClosedReview.net, let you extend your reach beyond your immediate rivals. When played, they boost the range of your Rejection! cards, making it possible to target players who might have thought they were safe on the other side of the table.

No submission is truly out of scope when anonymous reviewers are involved.

Criticism cards
Biases and Weights cards

Machine learning experiments take time, and it's no different in Rebuttal!! Deploy experiments during your turn and track them using Biases & Weights. From your next turn, you'll reap the results—gaining bonuses like extra card draws, improved defenses, or even advanced rejection capabilities.

Just don't forget: if your experiment gets scooped before it finishes, or gets killed by a compute failure, all that work goes to waste.

Not every twist in the peer review process can be planned for—thankfully, Rebuttal! has a whole suite of cards to reflect the glorious chaos of research life. Send a reviewer on a Coffee Break to dodge disaster, or challenge a player to a Debate!. From the devastating Reviewer #2 Rampage to a career-crushing Plagiarism card, each play can shift the balance of power. Whether you're scrambling after an Extended Deadline or crashing a player's experiments with Compute Failure, no two games are ever the same.

Criticism cards
Role cards

In the peer review Thunderdome, you never truly know who is your friend and who is your rival! Each player is assigned a secret role, which each have their own mission to complete in order to win the game. Play strategically without revealing your motivations, and play others against each other while you submit your way to victory!

Play as one of 32 notable researchers, each unique with a special ability! The back of the researcher cards can also be used to track how many submissions you have.

Note:
A production-version of this game would of course seek permission to use researchers' likeness, and only include them if permission were granted.

Furthermore, in the current prototype, researchers are picked at the start of the game and cannot be changed, potentially leading to somewhat imbalanced gameplay. To resolve this in a production-version, the plan would be to make researcher cards "collaborator cards" in the expansion pack Battle of the Benchmarks!, where players forge collaborations by winning benchmark competitions.

Researcher cards
Community cards

Keep up-to-date with all the latest in ML with community cards! These cards change the rules every round for all players, adding even more chaos to the review process! Whether you're doomscrolling Slacker News or r/thingularity, or keeping plugged in with TechHunch or The Merge, each update brings unpredictable twists—new advantages, fresh challenges, and the occasional surprise breakthrough that might just save your submission (or sink it entirely).

Note:
To keep the base game a bit more streamlined and easier to learn, the current plan for a production-version would be to put community cards in the expansion pack Scaling Laws!, and also feature more than the 20 community cards included in the prototype.

REGISTER YOUR INTEREST!

I would love to make a version of Rebuttal! available for the AI community. However, there would be a lot of hoops to jump through to make it happen, and it would only make sense at a certain scale. To figure out if this project has a chance of getting off the ground, I need to see if there's enough enthusiasm.

If you're at all interest in getting your hands on a copy of Rebuttal! (and possibly the numerous expansion packs planned!), or would just like to support the project, please consider registering your interest, using the form below.

The more people who register their interest, the more likely it is that we can make this happen. You can help by sharing this form with your friends, your colleagues, your supervisor, your parents, anyone!

Thank you for the support! ❤️

Luke

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A massive thank you to Kayleigh Auton, Kerstin Kläser, Alberto Cattaneo and Alex Titterton for their help and support on the project!