About Turn Zero
Turn Zero is an AI-powered playtesting platform that helps board game designers find balance issues, broken strategies, and edge cases — before they print a single copy.
Designing a board game requires months of grueling iteration. Unfortunately, many designers spend ages balancing their game, only to discover a game-breaking exploit or dominant strategy after publication — when it is too late to fix. You can't patch cardboard. Turn Zero exists to change that. By running thousands of AI-driven simulations across diverse player archetypes, we surface balance issues, pacing problems, and strategic dead-ends that human playtesting alone would miss. All before you commit to manufacturing.
Our goal: no bad board games.
Cardboard can't be patched. Once a game is printed and shipped, balance issues are permanent — errata only goes so far.
Human playtesting is slow and biased. You can run dozens of games; we run thousands in minutes.
Diverse strategies matter. Our AI archetypes explore corners of the strategy space that your playtest group would never try.
Catch issues early. A single dominant strategy found before printing can save a game’s reputation — and a designer’s livelihood.
Upload Your Ruleset
Share your game's rules document — PDF, text, or doc. Our engine parses the mechanics, win conditions, and player interactions.
Select AI Personas
Choose from a roster of AI player archetypes — aggressive, economic, turtle, wildcard, and more. Each plays with a distinct strategy, just like real playtesters would.
Run Simulations
The Turn Zero engine runs hundreds to thousands of simulated games, mixing and matching archetypes to explore the strategic space of your design.
Get Your Report
Receive a detailed report with balance scores, win-rate breakdowns by archetype, detected issues, and actionable observations — all backed by real simulation data.
The Story
Turn Zero is the brain child of a unique group of individuals. This group includes a powerful combination of project managers, senior software developers, cyber security gurus, and marketing professionals, who all happen to love playing board games. We often watch the online reviews to find another great title for us to play. Mixed in those reviews are far too many games that fail, miss the mark, or have broken mechanisms. We want to help eliminate that.
We built Turn Zero to elevate board games. By combining modern AI with game-theoretic simulation, we give designers the same kind of stress-testing that software gets: automated, exhaustive, and repeatable. The name says it all: catch the issues at turn zero, before the first real game begins.
Ready to stress-test your game?
Upload your ruleset and game assets and get your first AI Sanity Test report.