GPT Board Game Titles
It is 2021, a blog can’t exist without an “I trained an AI” post like these trailblazers:
So here we are.
When we were building out Virtually Expo (UK Games Expo ‘gone virtual’ for a pandemic-stricken world), we built a Discord bot that let visitors join one of UKGEs famed queues.
One of the things this bot did was to give you a random, AI generated board game when you reached the ‘front’ of the queue. These were generated in advance by training a GPT-2 model (with the aid of Max Woolf’s fantastic gpt-2-simple) on the top 2,000 board games from BoardGameGeek.
First up; if you’re not familiar with the board game world - there’s a lot of games named after places. From Carcassonne, through Orléans and Mombasa, to Bruges and Snowdonia.
The model seemed to pick up on this trend and continued the theme with ideas such as:
- France
- Monmouth Tycoon
- Exeter
- High Wycombe
- Choose Your Own Adventure: Argentina
- Turning Point: Swansea
- Crisis in Northumberland
Then there’s the expansion trend. Carcassonne has somewhere between 10 and 134 expansions, depending on how you’re counting. If the publisher ever runs out of ideas, this model has them covered:
- Carcassonne: Yard Edition
- Carcassonne: New York
- Carcassonne: Vale of the Fallen Dragons of War
- Carcassonne: Abyss – The Lost Chronicles
- Carcassonne: Asteroid Derby
- Carcassonne: The Cards are on the Rise
along with positive vibes from the appropriately titled:
- Pandemic: Alive!
There’s the expansions that promise to change the game quite significantly:
- Ticket to Ride: The Quest for the Galaxy
- Rallyman Gettysburg
- Animal Upon Animal: The Camelot Campaign
- Unlock! The Impacts of Crime
- Rory’s Story Cubism
- Smash Up: First Person Shooter
- Power Grid: The Next Phase of Electronic Warfare
- Zooloretto: Run!
- Ticket to Ride: The Official Route
- Field Commander: Cthulhu
- Catan: All the Pretty Things
I am tickled by the idea of Zooloretto, a game in which you carefully plan a zoo filled with cute animals to attract visitors, turned on its head by the addition of the ‘Run!’ expansion.
There’s the philosophical:
- Who Will Win? Modern Magic: The Gathering
- Where Did All the Money Go?
- If There Were No Dragon…
- Something Big Is Bluffling the Earth
- Mythic Tales: All the President’s Cards Are Spell Cards!
- Fascism!
- Long Story Short: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
I checked, ‘bluffling’ isn’t a word, but I can definitely agree that something big is indeed bluffling the Earth.
There’s the games I’d play in an instant:
- Valley of the Uzis
- I Cast a Spell: The Card Game
- Accursed Gratuitous Sarcasm
- Einstein: Son of a crab and his business partner embark on a daring mission
and the ones that are perhaps for a more niche audience:
- Battle Masters: The Fate of Meddle and Sump-Hole goats
- Cottage Cheese
- My Wife Is Alive!
- Quirky Fate: You Win! War of Entrails
- Funky Poop
- 10 Days, No Jumpers
- Pyromania Board Game
- Nuns on the Underground
- Rent a Bear In The Night
The ‘creative use of an IP’ award goes to:
- Warhammer 40,000: The Futon War
- Bob Ross: Guitar Hero
- Dice Throne: Season Two – Star Wars Battle for Aragorn
- Hannibal: Family
It seems to have a slightly confusing tendency to generate fish-themed games:
- Fish Prince
- Piranha Detective
- My Fish is Fish
- Flying Carp
- Rolling Fishes
- Death to the Lobster
of which, ‘My Fish is Fish’ raises questions I do not have answers for.
Then there’s the titles that cause genuine concern about the future of AI:
- EXPLOSION: A New World
- Our Souls Are Marketable
- Unconditional Surrender-era
- No Peace Without Fire
Yep. We should probably stop doing this before it’s too late.
Finally, a few I liked:
- The Road to Wales
- Zombie and Screamin’ Zombies
- Explosive Substances Control 4: Harry the Accuser
- TATOOOMPI
- Capital Letters
- Get Off My Lawn! Unfairly Impeded
- Do Something Crazy
- Microsoft Word
- Fabio’s Garage
- There’s Something Shifting In Paris
- Escape Goat & Cat with Guest Cat
- Band-Aid Man
- Billionaire Bus Driver
- Bulk Spaghetti
- Cryptocop
- The Captain Is, But He’s Bigger
- Pie
- Gravy Lobby
- Whoopi Goldberg
- YAM!
- Tesla and the Other Robots