We get asked sometimes whether we use AI to write our articles. Short answer? Not really. Long answer? Sort of — but only in the same way we’d use a spell-checker or a calculator. Rules and Guides is built on real players sharing real experiences. Everything we post starts with us — actual people sitting around actual tables, trying to figure out why the rulebook contradicts itself halfway through setup. The AI part comes later, when we’re cleaning up the mess we made trying to explain it.
Each of us writes the way we talk. Albert types like he’s teaching a class. Christine’s pieces sound like she’s chatting over snacks. Thomas sometimes goes full dissertation before catching himself. That’s what makes this site what it is — six people, six styles, all trying to make board gaming clearer and more approachable. The only problem is, none of us are professional editors. We’re parents, teachers, retirees, and tech nerds. Which means sometimes our first drafts look like they were written during a midnight playtest after three cups of coffee. That’s where AI helps.
When we say we “use AI,” we’re talking about basic writing tools — Grammarly, QuillBot, or sometimes a language assistant to tidy up structure or phrasing. Think of it as proofreading software that catches missing commas, fixes run-on sentences, and makes sure our explanations aren’t a wall of text that scares readers away. The heart of every piece — the opinions, the examples, the mistakes we made playing a game wrong for six months — that’s all us. No AI tool can fake the frustration of discovering halfway through Twilight Imperium that you’ve been ignoring a major rule. Trust us, we’ve lived it.
We treat AI the same way we treat any tool: useful, but not magic. It can check spelling, smooth transitions, or help rephrase an awkward sentence, but it can’t think, it can’t play, and it definitely can’t argue about whether Terraforming Mars is better with the Prelude expansion. That’s a human-only debate, and it gets heated.
Sometimes we also use AI to help with accessibility and clarity. Albert’s a teacher, so he’s big on making sure our guides are easy to follow for new players. He’ll run parts of a long article through an AI readability checker to make sure the explanations aren’t buried under jargon. If it says something’s too complicated, we simplify it. The goal isn’t to sound smarter — it’s to help people actually understand the rules without rereading the same paragraph six times.
A few of the images you see on the site are AI-generated, and we’re open about that too. Board game photography can be tricky — not every game is easy to shoot, and not every publisher allows use of their official art. Sometimes we’ll create AI-generated placeholders when we want to illustrate a concept, like “how to set up your first worker placement game” or “why your table always ends up covered in tokens.” They’re never meant to mislead or replace real photos — just to make the page look less like a block of text while we work on getting our own pictures ready.
We’re careful about how we use those tools. No fake reviews, no made-up experiences, no pretending AI played the game for us. Everything on Rules and Guides starts with people: Albert teaching a group of middle schoolers Catan correctly for once, Walter convincing his kids to finish a game without flipping the board, Raymond learning Wingspan with his grandkids, or Thomas going down a two-hour rabbit hole about Brass: Birmingham’s economic cycle. You can’t invent that kind of stuff with an algorithm. It comes from real players, real moments, and yes, real mistakes.
We also know the internet’s full of AI-generated junk content — fake “reviews” that just reword rulebooks, lists that read like someone fed a thesaurus into a blender, and articles that sound vaguely human until you realize they’ve never actually played the game they’re talking about. That’s exactly what Rules and Guides exists to push back against. We’re not anti-technology, but we’re very much pro-authenticity. The human part is what matters — that’s what readers connect with.
If a piece ever uses AI beyond light editing — for example, to reformat a complex table, translate text from a non-English rulebook, or generate a placeholder description while we verify details — we’ll say so. Transparency is non-negotiable here. You deserve to know where something came from. You’ll never see a “review” written entirely by AI, because that’s not reviewing. That’s content farming. And we’re not farmers; we’re gamers with day jobs and opinions.
We also take privacy seriously when it comes to AI tools. Anything that processes our drafts is either offline or anonymized. We don’t upload personal data, reader emails, or anything private into AI systems. Our goal is to use technology responsibly, not hand your data over to a bot because it promised better sentence structure.
At the end of the day, Rules and Guides is about trust. You read our stuff because you know it’s written by people who actually play these games — people who’ve made the same mistakes, had the same rules arguments, and discovered the same “aha!” moments when a mechanic finally clicks. We’ll keep using whatever tools help us communicate better, but we’ll never let them replace what makes this site human.
So if you ever wonder whether something you’re reading here was “written by AI,” the answer’s simple: no. It was written by one of us, sitting at a table covered in cards, dice, and empty coffee mugs, probably trying to figure out whether you may also means you must. AI might’ve cleaned up the grammar afterwards, but the words, the thoughts, and the occasional bad joke — those are 100% human.
If you have any questions about our writing process or want to know exactly how we use AI tools behind the scenes, email us anytime at [email protected]. We’ll tell you straight — no filters, no bots, just honest humans trying to make rulebooks a little less painful.