My kids love the game Gnomes at Night. We love it because it gets them to collaborate on something that’s not a video game, forces them to think outside the box a bit, and they can generally finish a game in a few minutes, so it stays fresh.
The only problem is they’ve played each of the mazes dozens of times, and, frequently, they can get through a whole set of games in 10 minutes. I would have thought the company behind Gnomes at Night would have recognized the market opportunity and created add-on packs. But no such luck.
Well, maybe AI can do it?
I spent a few hours going back and forth with Claude. It didn’t understand the game at first and kept creating mazes that one player could finish on their own. The graphics were pretty poor. It didn’t have any of the items you needed to collect. Just a maze.
After some convincing, and shots of the boards in action, the LLM was able to piece together what I was looking for. I spent another hour or so going back and forth on fixing some of the minor things (how to print it so I could tape it to the 10” square board; making the items match the ones in the game; making the items not be duplicated on both sides).
At that point, we had our proof of concept.
It worked. In fact, a couple of times the kids got stuck and had to really work their way through to even determine whether the objective was achievable (they all were!)
Now we have a nice little maze generator, where if we get bored, we can make 5-10 new boards, and the kids can give the new ones a shot for a while. I’m going to get some appropriately sized cardboard to glue/tape the mazes to, and we’ll have an endless supply of artifacts for these Gnomes to collect (at night).