For the people talking about automated or evolutionary design of board games, this has indeed been tried. The most successful one I know about is Ludi¹) which produced the game Yavalath²), which I think is a pretty darn good game.

¹) http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf

²) http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/