“Game Design Taste evals” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 12, 2026 · 39m

A personal eval I run on new AI models is “design a novel game, with mechanics that have never been seen before.” I do this because this is a domain I have enough taste in that I think I can tell if they are doing something actually creatively interesting.

For a long time, they would always say “time manipulation mechanics!” as their first answer. Braid was cool, guys, but, it's almost 20 years old now.

But reasoning models started getting novel. Later models started getting reasonably fun.

o1

OpenAI's o1 started to impress me. It came up with:

Scratch and sniff board game, where what cards…