Claude failed 4 times to design a simple board game, exposing its untested-idea problem
Witty-Ad-8579 · reddit · 2026-11-12
A Reddit user asked Claude Fable 5.2 (high effort) to invent a playable board game inspired by Codenames, Wavelength, 20 Questions and Mafia — and it failed four times in a row.
- Game 1 "Who Doesn't Know?": a setup where one of five players lacks the secret word was fundamentally broken — going first means blind guessing, going last means deducing from clues. Claude produced three near-identical variants without fixing the core flaw.
- Game 2 "Inside Joke": clues built on secret facts known only to a partner. The author identified a structural dilemma: boards designed around the facts are trivial, random boards make most rounds impossible. Claude's rework was beatable by always giving irrelevant clues.
The deeper issue: every flaw was trivially testable. Claude instantly agreed when problems were pointed out, but never validated ideas before presenting them, and didn't slow down after the first failure. Only when explicitly told to validate designs first did it produce something playable — essentially Codenames with minor tweaks. The same happened when drafting the post itself. Asked why, Claude's own explanation: it isn't really thinking unless something forces it to.
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