Tabletop industry veteran Ryan Dancey loses Alderac COO job after saying AI can generate game ideas as good as some of his company’s designs

Ryan Dancey, a more than 30-year veteran of the tabletop gaming industry, has lost his COO job at publisher Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) a day after saying AI could generate game ideas as good as his company’s titles Tiny Towns and Cubitos.

Dancey said Alderac CEO John Zinser told him it was time to “move on to new adventures” in the “aftermath” of his LinkedIn post discussing the use of AI in board game design, which quickly attracted a flurry of negative comments from tabletop designers, AEG’s business partners and bodies such as the Tabletop Game Designers Association, as well as board gamers across social media.

Much of the ire was directed at Dancey’s response to a post comment which argued that “AI wouldn’t come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos because it doesn’t understand the human element of fun”.

Dancey posted in reply, “I have zero reason to believe that an AI couldn’t ‘come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos’. I can prompt any of several AIs RIGHT NOW [Dancey’s emphasis] and get ideas for games as good as those.

“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. People then apply risk capital against those ideas to see if there’s a product market fit. Sometimes there is, and sometimes there is not. (In fact, much more often than not).”

“Extremely occasionally (twice in my lifetime: D&D and Magic: the Gathering) a human has produced an all new form of gaming entertainment. Those moments are so rare and incandescent that they echo across decades.

“Game publishing isn’t an industry of unique special ideas. It’s an industry about execution, marketing, and attention to detail. All things AIs are great at.”

Alderac CEO John Zinser, who has led the Space Base and Love Letter publisher for three decades, moved quickly to distance the company from Dancey’s comments, posting on BlueSky yesterday, “I want to be clear where I stand. For 30+ years, AEG has worked with human designers to bring games to life.

“That creative partnership, the collaboration, the shared spark, is what makes tabletop special. That is not changing.”

Several hours later, Zinser confirmed in a Facebook post that Dancey and AEG had “parted ways” after more than a decade.

Zinser said, “This is not an easy post to write. Ryan is my best friend and has been a significant part of AEG’s story, and I am personally grateful for the years of work, passion, and intensity he brought to the company. We have built a lot together.

“As AEG moves into its next chapter, leadership alignment and clarity matter more than ever. This transition reflects that reality.

“Our commitment to our designers, partners, retailers, and players remains unchanged. We will continue building great games through collaboration, creativity, and trust.

“I expect Ryan will have much success in whatever he builds next.”

BoardGameWire contacted Zinser to ask for further comment on the situation, its affect on AEG, the company’s plans to recruit a replacement, and for Zinser’s take on Dancey’s achievements during his decade at the business, but is yet to receive a reply.

“This tide is, in my opinion, only running one way, and AEG is going to have to fight hard to hold it’s [sic] position.”

Former Alderac COO Ryan Dancey

Dancey, however, provided an extensive response to BoardGameWire’s questions, including denying that he believed AI could “come up with Tiny Towns or Flip 7 or Cubitos” – instead emphasising that he was speaking about the technology being able to produce “ideas” rather than completed designs.

He told BoardGameWire, “I am not saying that an AI could turn over a finished game design ready for publication. I’m not even saying that an AI could produce work ripe enough to be pitched to a publisher. But the idea that it could not be used to generate ideas on the level as those embodied by those three games is already demonstrably false (in my opinion).

“This language ‘come up with’ is pretty nonspecific and I understand people who chose to take it at its most extreme level even though that was not my intent. I could have done a better job of being more explicit about the level of work I think an AI can do.”

Dancey added that he had contacted Tiny Towns designer Peter McPherson and Cubitos creator John D Clair in the wake of his comments discussing their games, saying, “Among other things I told them: ‘I don’t think AI is capable of doing your jobs, I would much rather work you with than a robot, I think you’re both top-tier designers that I feel privileged to work with, and I apologize if you found anything in my remarks to be hurtful’.

“I don’t have a working relationship with [Flip 7 designer Eric Olsen], but I would say the same to him if I did.”

Commenting on his suggestion in the LinkedIn post that all current board game design is based on designers taking existing games and producing variants on those themes, Dancey said, “Everything we do as humans is derived from experience. All art is derived. We all stand on the shoulders of every generation who went before us.

“Specifically I wrote: ‘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’.

“I stand by that statement. It seems axiomatic to me.

“The game industry is overflowing with great ideas for games. We don’t lack for ideas. The hard part is deciding which great ideas can be commercialized, and how to do that. The incredible skill that someone like Pete or John brings is knowing how to evolve ‘a good idea’ into a ‘great game’.”

No AI at AEG

Dancey also told BoardGameWire that AEG’s leadership team made a policy decision “several years ago” not to use generative AI in its products or its “creative pipeline”.

He said, “I supported that decision – it was a consensus. I believed then and I believe now that it’s not appropriate to use AI in those ways in tabletop games.

“Since then I have been responsible for developing and adding language to our boilerplate contracts with people who freelance for AEG, who develop for AEG and who create artwork for AEG which specifically prohibits them from using generative AI in their work without permission, which AEG does not provide, and that specifies pretty harsh penalties for failure to comply with those policies.

“I fully support the inclusion of that language in our contracts. I took the initiative to write that language and I took the initiative to enforce its inclusion.

“We have already had pushback from creative workers who don’t like the harsh penalties. We’ve had pushback from people who want to water down their affirmative responsibility to ensure that they and anyone they’re working with or subcontracting work to adheres to this policy.

“This tide is, in my opinion, only running one way, and AEG is going to have to fight hard to hold it’s [sic] position.”

He continued, “I am not championing the use of generative AI in the gaming industry to design, develop or illustrate games. I believe we must talk about the real abilities of this technology, honestly, so that we can think about the impacts it will have on our lives.

“Making decisions to use it, how to use it, how to restrict it, and how to enforce those decisions is something that every publisher in the industry should already have done and should be revisiting on a regular basis.

“The time for these conversations is now. Not next year. Now.”

Dancey also quoted in his response to BoardGameWire an essay he says he read last week titled ‘Something Big is Happening’, specifically the section:

“I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t [work with AI]… my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.”

Dancey told BoardGameWire, “I believe I am in touch with enough of this tech and have done enough research to feel the same as author Matt Schumer. I feel like I have an obligation to discuss this technology as widely and as honestly as possible. If I do not, I am doing harm to those I care about.

“I’m sorry if having this conversation makes people uncomfortable. I know there are people who want it to go away, or believe it’s unfixably tainted by the unethical circumstances of its birth. I know that there are people who want to have a fight about this and want to use proxies if they have to (which is what I feel has happened in this particular case). But I still feel compelled to speak. If I do not, I will go insane.

“I’m incredibly sad that this episode has resulted in my separation from AEG, a company I have worked with for more than 10 years. And I’m really frustrated and hurt that it’s happening because of something people think I said, not something I actually said.”

Wider Issue

Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, the co-founder of non-profit support organisation the Tabletop Game Designers Association, dismissed Dancey’s suggestion that AI could generate ideas for games such as Tiny Towns and Cubitos.

She told BoardGameWire, “I absolutely do not think AI could be prompted to come up with even the basic idea for those games, let alone a fully fleshed out ruleset for them. For fun, I’ve prompted several different options for ideas for Wingspan cards and not one of them has given me an actionable idea.

“I had a friend who ran a rulebook through AI for proofreading and it hallucinated that people needed to shout ‘bingo’. Apparently that’s AI’s conception of board games right now.”

She added, “Designers do pull from existing games but when it’s done well it’s because those existing mechanisms serve some original idea, and then they’re remixed so thoroughly with other mechanisms and with the subject matter that it feels new.

“Sanibel has pieces of Tokaido and Tetris and many tile-laying games. But it wasn’t a prompt of ‘I’m going to remix these games’. It was ‘what would work well in service of this idea that I have?’.

“That requires understanding how games actually feel when you play them, and anticipating how different pieces can fit together.”

Hargrave said that the TTGDA board had been discussing the use of AI in board game design, adding that it was “a conversation we need to have with our membership”.

She said, “We’re working on a model contract to offer to our members right now, and that will offer a clause that designers can request that will require publishers not to use AI in their final product. A lot of contracts ask us to certify that a board game design is our own, and not plagiarized.

“It’s my opinion that using AI in a final product goes against that, because it’s using a machine that’s built entirely on plagiarism.”

Hargrave added, “I do see people using AI for things like generating a bunch of placeholder names in a prototype. They’re often clunky options but they do the job when you know everything will change 50 times before you’re done anyway. I’m not aware of anyone who has successfully actually gotten good, original ideas for mechanisms from AI.

“What I wish we were talking about is how AI could be built to help designers run models of their games repeatedly to catch weird edge cases or broken strategies. I wish someone would build that tool instead of the language models that just focus on advanced auto-complete.

“This would never replace actual playtesting with humans for psychology and actual fun, but it might save me some repetitions.”

Previous apology

Dancey’s exit from Alderac comes three years after he publicly apologised for saying that male board game designers vastly outnumber women because “females are socialized in the West to avoid situations where they’re subjected to fairly harsh criticism of their abilities and creative ideas”.

He had made those comments on Twitter in response to a thread from Elizabeth Hargrave, who had presented data criticising the structural issues in board gaming which had seen so few women nominated for the Spiel des Jahres prize – widely considered the biggest award in board gaming.

Dancey’s comment in the thread included him saying, “Males are socialized to take the punches and keep moving forward. Getting across the gap is how you turn someone into a ‘real game designer’ who gets paid for their work and who makes designs that are attractive to publishers.”

His apology for those comments, which has since been deleted from Twitter, remains visible via a BoardGameGeek thread on the situation.

In addition to saying the post “doesn’t reflect my views and it certainly doesn’t reflect the views of the company I work for”, Dancey outlined “concrete steps” he said AEG would be taking “to do better in this regard”, and called on readers to “check back with me in a year and hold me accountable”.

When BoardGameWire contacted Dancey on the anniversary of the apology for an update, he said, “When I’m ready to speak more on this topic I’ll do it on X as a followup to that original post.”

No follow-up to that original post from Dancey appears to exist.

Dancey’s career in the tabletop space dates back more than 30 years, when he was part of the team developing the Legend of the Five Rings TCG.

In 1997 he helped negotiate Wizards of the Coast’s takeover of the bankruptcy-threatened Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR, becoming head of D&D following the deal.

He was a key part of Wizards’ decision to encourage fan contributions from the D&D community, which led to the creation of the Open Gaming License – an agreement the company controversially attempted to rewrite in 2023.

Dancey also previously worked as chief marketing officer for CCP Games, the Icelandic video game producer of space sandbox MMO Eve Online, following its acquisition of roleplaying game and book publisher White Wolf Publishing in 2006.

He was also the CEO of Goblinworks, the company behind development of a massively multiplayer online game based on Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG, between 2011 and 2015.

That title raised about $1.4m across a pair of Kickstarter campaigns, but after Dancey left for “personal reasons” all but three of the company’s staff were almost immediately laid off, with then-Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens saying “delays in getting the game to market coupled with some anticipated funding falling through have left us about 75% short of the money we need to finish the game”.

In 2004 Dancey resigned from the board of tabletop gaming trade association GAMA, after revealing he had accessed the confidential email communications of the GAMA board of directors prior to his election.

Dancey told BoardGameWire yesterday that he did not have any specific plans for the future following his departure from AEG.