Puzzles that live inside the world — Tonda Ros on eight years of design: "no intended solution" and the melancholy Myst left behind

"Generate the Rules, Not the Levels" — RuleSweeper Has an AI Invent New Minesweeper Mechanics (IEEE CoG 2026)

One piece today: a look at RuleSweeper, presented at IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2026 (September 1-4, Madrid). Ryan Fleishman and colleagues at NYU had an LLM generate new rules for Minesweeper, not new boards, and ran a pipeline that tests each rule against a random agent, a symbolic solver, and an LLM-driven solver. Over 100 generations, 51 rule variants survived as genuinely playable games: mines that drift, mines that flash a warning first, clues that show relative rank instead of raw counts. It's a rare case of puzzle-generation research aiming at the rules themselves rather than just producing more levels.