This may be a familiar scene to you: it’s Christmas vacation, you’re spending time with your extended family, and you decide to break out a board game for everyone to enjoy. But there’s always that one person who’s just no into it and you have to drag into the room. In my family, that’s my father in law. He’s unquestioningly a brilliant man, but put him in a game-like situation, with lots of yelling family members, and he tunes right out. In all the years we’ve been getting together, he’s never won a game.
So when Christmas rolled around in 2017, and I found myself looking for a Christmas gift for my father in law, I thought, “why not give him the best gift of all - the gift of winning?”. What I needed was a game that he’d be guaranteed to win.
The box for 'Fundamentals of Canadian Tax Law: Board Game Edition'
The first play of 'Fundamentals of Canadian Tax Law: Board Game Edition', in 2017.
As it happens, my father in law is Vern Krishna, Canada’s preeminent tax lawyer. He’s literally written the book on Canadian tax law. So why not use his book as material for a special board game designed especially for him?
This is how ‘Fundamentals of Canadian Tax Law: Board Game Edition’ came to be. I extracted a collection of trivia and facts from his book, created skill-testing question cards, a board, pieces, currency and a rule sheet. The game is a blend of Monopoly and Snakes & Ladders. Your goal is to get as much money from Canada to the Cayman Islands without the CRA bankrupting you on the way.
I gave it to him. And we played it. And he lost! The chance / skill ratio was way off. Who knew board games were so hard to design? Anyways, a bit of rule tweaking later, we had ourselves a viable board game.
Fast forward a few years, and I found myself wondering, “Could I automate the process of making niche board games?” The ‘Fundamentals’ game was super labour intensive to create (lots of reading, lots of designing in Photoshop and Illustrator). But it wasn’t all that bad to assemble (basically just paper and some dollar-store craft stuff).
So then I spent way too much money on a fancy .new domain name: boardgame.new. And I made this little Rails app that lets you enter any topic (for example, ‘cave moss’), and the app will download a PDF kit that you can print out and use to build your own board game. The kit includes everything you need: the rule sheet, the board tiles, the player pieces and the trivia and chance cards. I added a simple Stripe checkout to it and launched it. It was a janky MVP but it did the job. I’ve since taken it down because the domain name cost too much to renew.
In hindsight, I was probably about 2 years too early with this idea. I built this app before ChatGPT and LLMs in general entered the scene. My app scraped Wikipedia and used some pre-written logic to generate all the content, something that LLMs would excel at doing with far less instruction. Maybe someday I’ll resurect it and refactor it to use LLMs. But for now, I’m opening up the repo in case its useful to anyone else.