How these games are made

Written with AI, directed by a person

The games are designed and written with AI: mechanics, scenes, answer keys and the rules the game master follows. Christoph Mauer, who runs the site, decides what gets made and sets the standard a game has to meet. Before a draft is finished, independent AI reviewers play the compiled card cold and attack it for unfair puzzles, exploits and false claims, and anything that can be computed is checked by a script: logic puzzles brute-forced for a single answer, chess positions checked against an engine, quiz facts against their sources.

Machine-playtested

A game isn't published because it reads well. It's published because it survives being played. So we play it: one AI runs the game as game master, a second plays it as an ordinary competent player, and a script reads the transcript for the two failures a machine can catch on its own — a missing ledger (the one-line game state every reply should end with), which means the running state is quietly falling out of the game, and a sealed solution that leaks before the ending.

A playtest mostly exercises the opening, so endings get a test of their own. Each card is dropped into late positions — an accusation, a last batch, a final leg down the mountain — and the game master's result line is checked against what the card's own rules say it must be: which ending, and what score. Both records are tied to the exact card that ships; change a line of it and the build refuses to publish until the tests are run again.

A run that trips either check goes back for a fix and another pass. The rest (rules that contradict each other or leave a situation undefined, difficulty that collapses into a walkover or spikes into a dead end) comes out of reading the transcripts afterwards. It's the same discipline as regression testing software, pointed at a game instead of a codebase, and like any test suite it catches what it's pointed at, not everything that can go wrong.

All original work

Every game is an original work. We do not copy the rules text, board, components, artwork, or trade dress of any existing game. The names, settings, mechanics, and wording are our own. Where a game sits in a familiar genre (a locked-room mystery, a dungeon crawl, hangman, twenty questions), it follows a shared tradition, not a template lifted from a published game.

What the cards guarantee while you play, and how you can check it, is on the methodology page.