Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked-about topics in the games industry right now, but how much of that conversation is actually about environmental impact? A new report from GGG board member Professor Paul Wake suggests the answer is “not nearly enough.”
AI in Board Game Design and Development, published as part of the EU Horizon Europe-funded STRATEGIES project, examines how AI is currently being used across analogue, hybrid, and digital board game cultures and what the sustainability implications are.
The report’s findings will be familiar to anyone paying attention to the crowdfunding space: AI use in board game design is, for now, overwhelmingly concentrated in the generation of visual assets, particularly at the early unfunded stages of Kickstarter campaigns where artwork is needed before budget is available. Debates about AI art are loud and polarised, but Wake’s research highlights a striking absence at the centre of them: almost nobody is talking about the environmental cost. Image generation is among the most carbon-intensive uses of AI, approximately 1.14g CO₂e per query, yet this barely registers in community discussions that are otherwise passionate about labour, creativity, and transparency.
Disclosure is another concern. A survey of the 42 highest-funded board game crowdfunding campaigns from the first half of 2025 found that only two projects acknowledged any use of AI at all. The norms around reporting are, at best, inconsistent.
Beyond art generation, the report explores AI’s role in hybrid and app-assisted games, a category of growing concern for sustainability. Players and designers consistently value longevity as one of board games’ defining qualities: the ability to pull a game off a shelf decades later and still play it. Digital components threaten that affordance, and while little attention has been paid to the environmental costs of software obsolescence, the report argues it deserves much more.
There is, however, genuine potential on the horizon. AI-assisted playtesting, allowing games to be tested thousands of times automatically before human playtesting begins, could reduce wasted production cycles and support more considered, sustainable design. This potential is, as yet, largely untapped.
The report closes with a clear research agenda, identifying the environmental impact of AI-generated art, the lifecycle costs of hybrid games, and the possibility of AI-extended game longevity as key areas for further investigation. It is early-stage research, and it raises more questions than it answers — but they are exactly the right questions for an industry beginning to take its environmental responsibilities seriously.
The full report is freely available under a Creative Commons licence at strategieshorizon.eu.