DIY Board Game?
A cautionary tale of tornadoes, trigonometry, and trusting the machines It all started innocently enough. My daughter came home with a school project that required designing a board game. Like any good parent who definitely doesn't go overboard, I immediately bought her a blank DIY board game kit on Amazon. Months later, when we finally excavated it from the pile of "we'll definitely do this someday" projects, we decided to create our own masterpiece. Living in Oklahoma, where spring means grabbing popcorn and watching tornado coverage like it's the Super Bowl, the theme was obvious. We've chased a few tornadoes ourselves (safely, from a distance, while questioning our life choices), so why not make a game about it? "Risk" was already taken, but "Moderate Risk" – that magical threshold where Oklahomans actually start paying attention to weather warnings – seemed perfect. It was either brilliant wordplay or dad-joke territory. I chose to believe the former.
The Brainstorming Session: Where Dreams Meet Reality
Armed with sheets of paper and unbridled optimism, we started brainstorming. The ideas flowed like debris in an EF3:
"Waterloo Road" and "Newcastle" would be prime tornado spots (if you know, you know)
"Wall clouds" would be where players encounter tornadoes
Obstacles included the classics: running out of gas, flooded roads, and – my personal contribution – "girlfriend wants to go home" (which was quickly vetoed by the committee)
We were cooking with gas. Or so we thought.
Enter Claude: The Unexpected Game Designer
That evening, while "supervising" from the pool (read: avoiding the actual work of organizing our chaotic notes), I had a thought: What if I asked Claude for help? Just a little assistance. Nothing major.
What happened next still amazes me. Claude didn't just help – it essentially became our lead game designer. The rules it produced were chef's kiss magnificent. Clear, balanced, engaging, and somehow capturing the exact spirit of storm chasing without making me do any actual work. I attached the rules to this article as Exhibit A in "Why AI Might Be Better at This Than Me."
The Cline Chronicles: A Journey into Digital Madness
Emboldened by success, I turned to my trusty coding assistant, Cline, with what seemed like a simple request: mock up the board layout. In a circular game where players might skip 3 spaces ahead or 5 back, I figured a little AI assistance would ensure I got the math right.
Oh, sweet summer child that I was.
The first attempt produced what I can only describe as a drunken snake trying to eat its own tail. The path was "squiggly" (that's the technical term), intersected itself multiple times, and the tiles were apparently playing hide and seek. It was modern art, but not a playable board game.
"Is there a way I could edit the underlying SVG path?" I asked Cline, hoping for a simple solution.
Cline's response? Here's an SVG file! With hints! Just edit these lines!
To Cline's credit, the hints were genuinely helpful. After some back-and-forth that felt like teaching a very smart but very literal child how to draw circles, we got it working. Even better, Cline had taken the initiative to add actual Tornado Alley locations – Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska – without being asked. It was like having an intern who actually paid attention in geography class.
The Great Spinner Incident
This is where things got... interesting.
Flush with success, I decided to push my luck. "Could we add a digital spinner like the one in our physical kit?"
The first attempt was close in the same way that a house is close to being a house after a tornado hits it. It looked like a meteorite had collided with a wheel of fortune and had a baby with Microsoft Paint. The text was doing interpretive dance, the icons were having an existential crisis, and the whole thing had the aesthetic appeal of a corrupted JPEG.
But it spun! Kind of!
I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to coax the text into alignment. At one point, I showed Cline examples from the game Twister, which I think just confused the poor AI even more. Eventually, I decided to call it good enough and showed my daughter the jagged, dystopian spinner.
"I like it!" she said. "The jagged edges make it easier to see that it's spinning!"
Kids. They're either brilliantly optimistic or just being nice to their defeated parent.
The Redemption Arc: Math to the Rescue
That afternoon, my engineering pride couldn't let the spinner win. This time, instead of just throwing prompts at Cline like spaghetti at a wall, I decided to actually engage with the problem. We discussed the underlying mathematics, the positioning algorithms, the trigonometry of placing text on a circle.
It was like that moment in every sports movie where the coach and player finally understand each other. Together, we worked out the exact formulas for positioning each slice of the spinner pie, calculated the proper text rotation angles, and – miracle of miracles – it worked!
The spinner was beautiful. Well, beautiful in the way that only a perfectly mathematical spinner divided into 12 sections with properly aligned "EF-5 Tornado" text can be beautiful.
The Supporting Cast
I'd be remiss not to mention ChatGPT's cameo appearance. While Claude handled rules and Cline wrestled with geometry, ChatGPT contributed what it apparently does best these days: a background image. It was actually quite nice, though I'm starting to suspect that's all anyone trusts it with anymore.
Lessons Learned
So what did I learn from this adventure in AI-assisted board game design?
AI is surprisingly good at game design – Like, concerningly good. Should I be worried about my job? (I'm not a game designer, but still...)
Complex problems require conversation – The spinner only worked when I stopped treating AI like a magic box and started treating it like a collaborator who needed context.
Kids are either the best critics or the kindest liars – I'm still not sure which, but I'll take the compliment about my jagged spinner.
Sometimes the journey is the destination – We may never print this game, but the process was genuinely fun and educational.
The Bottom Line
Did we revolutionize board game design? No. Did we create the next Monopoly? Definitely not. But did I discover that AI can be an incredible creative partner when you approach it right? Absolutely.
The best part? It was "super easy" – once you get past the squiggly paths, rebellious text, and occasional existential crisis. Like most things with AI, it was a very pleasant surprise mixed with moments of pure "what is happening right now."
Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. In fact, I'm already eyeing that "Earthquake Escape" idea my daughter mentioned...
Note to self: Maybe avoid natural disasters as game themes. Or at least pick ones that don't require complex trigonometry.
P.S. – If anyone from the weather service is reading this, "Moderate Risk: The Board Game" is meant purely for entertainment. Please continue your important work of actually warning people about tornadoes.