Negamax is very good for a wide variety of relatively simple games. It will utterly fail for Go, but I've written negamax AIs that dominate any casual player at

Negamax is very good for a wide variety of relatively simple games. It will utterly fail for Go, but I've written negamax AIs that dominate any casual player at chess, connect 4, reversi, gomoku, etc. They become yet stronger if you add a quiescence search.