You can already print a custom Monopoly-style board with your photos on it, and party games like Cards Against Humanity sell blank cards you fill in yourself. Both make you do the design. Family Board Game designs the game itself: it reads your family's stories, places and jokes, then builds a balanced route, event cards with real consequences, character tokens with powers and a rules sheet, and lets you play it on a phone before you print.
The data it runs on
Only what the family adds: typed or voice-noted stories, a list of places, inside jokes, house rules, and optional photos. Nothing is scraped. Each relative can add stories through an invite link without an account. Limits: stories are often short or vague, so the app asks one follow-up question per story ("Who pushed the car?"). Gaps: if a family adds fewer than 6 stories, the app fills the rest of the deck with neutral "family moments" cards (birthdays, first day of school) labelled as generic, and nudges relatives to replace them.
1. The mission
Every family has a game hiding in its stories. We turn the car that broke down at the border and Grandma's three-verse grace into something the kids ask to play every Saturday, so the stories get told again instead of fading.
2. Why people can't resist it
Seeing yourself on the board. Landing on "Uncle Bayo's five minutes" makes the whole table laugh before anyone reads the card.
Stories become currency. Every new story a cousin adds becomes a card in the next expansion, so relatives compete to contribute.
A physical heirloom. A printed box with your surname on the lid feels like something to keep, gift and pass down.
3. How it works for real
Collect: a form and invite link per relative; voice notes transcribed with Whisper or Gemini Flash audio.
Understand: a fast model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) tags each story with people, place, tone (funny, tender, chaotic) and a suggested game effect (forward, back, skip, roll again, everyone moves).
Design: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) writes the route, card text, token powers and rules as strict JSON, in the family's own voice.
Balance: a plain script simulates 500 games and nudges effects until the average game is 15 to 25 minutes and no seat wins more than 30%.
Draw: the board is rendered as SVG from the JSON (so names are always spelled right); an image model like Flux or Gemini image paints optional illustrations for the box lid.
Print: print-ready PDFs (board tiles, poker-size cards, standees) go to a print-on-demand partner with regional shipping.
4. Cost per use
About $0.30 per game, plus optional print. That covers tagging, the design pass, two revision passes and one box-lid illustration. Balancing runs as code, so it costs nothing.
Free: design one game, play it on phones, print-at-home PDF with a small watermark. Paid: $6 for the clean PDF and unlimited expansions; printed sets from $34 at roughly 45% margin over the print partner's cost.
5. Growth loop
A game needs stories from many relatives, so every game sends 5 to 15 invite links. Each relative who adds a story sees the board, and a share of them start their own side of the family's game. Printed boxes are gifts, and every box lid carries a small "make yours" code. Every month relatives add stories by invite link, which become a fresh expansion pack of event cards, and the game-night scoreboard keeps a running tally, so the family has a reason to gather again each Saturday.
6. Risks and guardrails
Hurtful stories: a classifier flags stories about illness, death, divorce or money trouble; they become cards only with a second family member's approval.
Kids' privacy: boards are private by default; shared images hide surnames and town names unless the family opts in.
Consent: anyone named on a card can ask for it to be removed, and it is gone from the next print.
IP: mechanics are generic (roll and move, cards); no copyrighted characters or board designs.
7. MVP build order
Story, place and rule intake form with a share link for relatives.
Claude prompt that returns board, cards, tokens and rules as JSON, plus the SVG board renderer.
Playable phone version (dice, move, draw) from the same JSON.