AutoBG: A Board Game Design Assistant with Interactive Ideation, Iterative Rulebook Generation, and Individualized Feedback
2026-06-01 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created AutoBG, a tool that helps people design board games by guiding them from rough ideas to finished rulebooks. It uses four parts: one to brainstorm ideas, one to write and improve rules, one to check for problems, and one to simulate player feedback. AutoBG learns from thousands of real games and player reviews to make better suggestions. Tests showed it works better than other AI tools and helps designers feel less stuck and find issues early in the process.
board game designAI-assisted creativityiterative refinementrulebook generationplaytestingmulti-turn dialogueautomated evaluationplayer simulationprototypinghuman-AI collaboration
Authors
Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang
Abstract
Designing a board game demands both thinking as a designer and experiencing as a player, while iterating through repeated prototyping and playtesting cycles, making it a cognitively intensive creative task well suited for human-AI collaboration. However, current systems lack end-to-end support to guide designers through the complete workflow from vague early ideation to iterative rulebook revision and audience testing. To this end, we present AutoBG, a board game design assistant built around critic-driven iterative refinement, comprising four specialized modules: BG-Ideator guides designers via multi-turn dialogue to produce structured design drafts; BG-Realizer generates complete rulebooks from drafts and revises them in a closed loop with BG-Critic, which diagnoses design flaws and gates each revision so that only verified improvements are accepted; and BG-Persona simulates individualized feedback from 150 real player profiles. Together, these modules enable designers to go from an initial idea to a polished, audience-tested rulebook within a single integrated workflow. The system is built on 2.2K structured rulebooks and 180K quality-filtered real player reviews, with task-specific training data derived for each module. Experiments on 207 held-out games show that AutoBG substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., GPT-5.4), generating rulebooks that approach the quality of published games. Furthermore, a user study with 30 participants across diverse experience levels confirms that AutoBG effectively reduces blank-page anxiety, surfaces hidden design flaws, and provides highly rated, practical assistance throughout the creative process.