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:


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:

along with positive vibes from the appropriately titled:


There’s the expansions that promise to change the game quite significantly:

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:

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:


and the ones that are perhaps for a more niche audience:


The ‘creative use of an IP’ award goes to:


It seems to have a slightly confusing tendency to generate fish-themed games:

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:

Yep. We should probably stop doing this before it’s too late.


Finally, a few I liked: