Distributed Cognition’s VINCO, a 0.5M-parameter model beat Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1, Astra and Kimi K3 in 36 of 40 in the the board game Catan.

Catan tests a skill coding benchmarks don’t: picking good moves without seeing the opponent’s cards or knowing the next dice roll.

The company’s broader view is that superintelligence will come from many models like this collaborating, rather than one model covering everything. By its numbers, VINCO is about 10 million times smaller than the frontier LLMs it beat in testing.