Hi there,
I'm looking for a board game that I could do AI for. I'm looking for something challenging (but not insanely difficult) as this for my Bachelor's thesis. I'd prefer something tile-based, moving pieces, lots of options/strategies - that kind of stuff. Hopefully something less popular then chess, but popular enough so that I could compare results etc.

Thanks in advance.

http://en.wikipedia...._of_board_games ?

You could make a tile based (more a grid) version of risk... you can check out my version at my site for a picture of what I'm talking about. Doing the AI for it was actually a more complicated than I thought, once I realized I also had to make the computer players dumb so you could win.

...once I realized I also had to make the computer players dumb so you could win.

That's usually as simple as playing a random (or weighted random) selection from your top n moves rather than simply the highest scoring one.

Arimaa (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/)

There is an active Bot development community - bots are yet to beat top players. There have also been so interesting recent developments that build on existing chess algorithms (using machine learning to sample and exclude potential moves from evaluation). You can test your bots against others and there is a yearly world championship (with a prize if your bot can beat the human champion).

Bot dev forum
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=devTalk

Few years ago, Battle for Wesnoth people were looking for someone interested in develop and get better their game AI. It's still quite bad, so maybe they are still interested