This looks like a really tidy framework for this class of general games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_

This looks like a really tidy framework for this class of general games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing). There's actually an annual competition for this type of thing. In this competition game rules are described using a language called GDL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Description_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Description_Language). Broadly there are two approaches. Super fast Monte-Carlo tree searches and algos which, from rules, infer game-state heuristics which are used in more traditional depth-limited search.