Writing to his personal LinkedIn, board game and tabletop industry veteran Ryan Dancey states that "In a year or two [AI] will be as useful as any new hire", and "A year or two after that it will be as useful as an experienced employee". And that's "In any field" - he doesn't think that there's anything special about designing board games that would stop AI from doing the job perfectly well.
Dancey is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Alderac Entertainment Group, and has a long history in the business. In the '90s he helped negotiate the sale of the Dungeons and Dragons license to Wizards of the Coast during the bankruptcy of TSR, and was a proponent of the Open Gaming License that allowed fans and other companies to create games that were compatible with D&D.
"I have zero reason to believe that an AI couldn't 'come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos'", Dancey says in a publicly accessible discussion on LinkedIn, adding "I can prompt any of several AIs RIGHT NOW and get ideas for games as good as those". Flip 7 is recognised by the industry as one of the best board games of the last two years, winning Best Party Game at both the 2024 Golden Geek awards and 2024 Origin Awards, and receiving a nomination for the 2025 Spiel Des Jahres, the highest achievement in tabletop gaming.
Dancey argues that "The gaming industry doesn't exist because humans create otherwise unobtainable ideas", "It exists because many many previous games exist, feed into the minds of designers, who produce new variants on those themes". He adds "Extremely occasionally (twice in my lifetime: D&D and Magic: the Gathering) a human has produced an all new form of gaming entertainment", and "Those moments are so rare and incandescent that they echo across decades".
"Game publishing isn't an industry of unique special ideas", Dancey adds, "It's an industry about execution, marketing, and attention to detail", which he says are "All things AIs are great at". For Dancey, this is just the shape of the future. "Pretending it 'isn't happening' is a terrible way to live", Dancey says, "The effective way to deal with the situation is to start by acknowledging that reality is what it is, then thinking about what that implies and how you will react to it".
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