I worked with my kids for a couple days and built a card game using ChatGPT, Midjourney and some other AI tools. One of a couple AI side projects I did over the holiday break.

Here’s how:

My kids and I love drafting card games (Dominion, Star Realms, Ascension) but each have flaws we wanted to fix.

ChatGPT got us quickly brainstorming on themes from medieval fantasy to 20s mafia. Then we used Claude + Fermat to test iterations of ideas on cards & mechanics.

We picked sci-fi. In the future warring cities (SF, NY, Beijing) each launch a space-ship trying to reach the “nearby” Kepler 425b first.

From here we iterated on a style for the art in Midjourney & Lexica, with the constraint of not using “in style of” any particular artist.

We used one anchor image w/MJ to generate the other card art in the same style. This took the most time, as current models are iffy at context. Often it forced the same character, not just style. And it loved guns & the same hair style despite heavy negative prompts.

For the box design, I've been watching MJ for a long time and had fallen in love with this kind of pop art, high contrast look so I used that to create some good images with movement.

We used the box design image to prime Stable Diffusion, MJ, and a Hugging Face model to do a bake-off for a logo. Then used a font matcher, bought the font we liked to match the style, and a little photoshop to clean it up.

We also experimented with Scenario to create card icons, Anthropic/Claude for characters & card class groupings (which outperformed OpenAI in this task), some Hugging Face models, and a few other AI tools along the way that haven’t quite made it into the game yet.

Lastly we flowed this into Figma, where I found an amazing plug-in that ties to Google Sheets where we could quickly iterate on mechanics. Thx @randylubin.

And after a couple days we had a working prototype full game!

AI felt most valuable at solving the blank page problem.

“Ideas for themes?”
“Show me 10 cards with that idea”
“Titles of mining personnel on a spaceship”
“How would you group these 60 cards into classes”

Many of the ideas were pretty average, but that’s not surprising for an LLM that is predicting the *average* next phrase/image/etc.

AI got ideas on the page instantly we could improve on. There is a lot of playtesting (these are not final mechanics!) but we’ve got something.

It’s been fun to dig in with the kids on a project we’ve talked about for a long time.

And as always, really using these products to produce something finished vs just tinkering exposes a lot of nuance that hones your thinking on where this should head next.