Every board game rulebook is awful [pdf]
drive.google.com
drive.google.com
Good idea
I bought two of the Fate books (first the "toolkit" book, then the "core system" book) not fully understanding the differences.
I know that there used to be some oversights where things where missing from the Law (like how to distinguish immediate effects from permanent effects on cards based on whether the box is paper or stone) but all of them have been resolved by now.
But single-page "QuickStart" rules for each player (which later serve as a reference) and a main rulebook can work well, also.
The problem with this is it can result in a bunch of "special cases" not being known about until later; IIRC we had this problem with Agricola and it wasn't until the fourth or fifth play through that we didn't identify a rule we had been mistaken about during play. That game's especially bad since it has so many possible interactions that could be A then B or B then A.
So the nuances can really matter. Even if you get the rules right, you don’t realise the importances of something until you play once or twice.
You're not going to learn a full complex ruleset in one sitting.Having a one page quick start of the game structure, allows you to get a feel for it before coming back for a deep dive.
Your brain has a foundation to build on when you read the ful complex rules - it wont feel like your brain is maxing out at 100%.
But I dare say many fans of "heavier" games - especially ones with more of a simulationist bent - would disagree that having fun is sufficient.
More recent Agricola rule books are much better.
This isn't a reasonable expectation. Your current state of documentation may be very different from some-other-software's current state of documentation. There may (or may not) be commonalities across those states, but assuming the most conservative situation leaves you with no commonality and the author's only option is to write the explanation for you. From there, you have to think about what transformations you need to apply to your current state to get it to the desired state.
Contrast this with game rulebooks. There is a clear commonality: situations where none of the players know any of the rules. Therefore, the rulebook can easily be written assuming no knowledge of the current rules of the game. Players that know the rules of the game can either a) go make everyone coffee and avoid polluting the learning phase with information that stretches the patience of the folks reading the rulebook; or b) claim to the players that don't know the rules that the rulebook is useless and they can do a much better job explaining all the nuances much better than the person that designed the game.
Source: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/problems-with-the-4doc-mode...
Jacob Kaplan-Moss described[0] the approach in 2009 (he omitted the How To guides, but they are in fact part of Django docs for as long as the framework is widely used). If there was a person to credit for this, that would be him.
Although this actually gets at a frustration I had with Johnson's essay. There's a section that presents research and examines the VSK model and Kalb's model, and in both cases finds: a) they're wrong, in the sense that they hypothesize different kinds of learners that don't exist; and b) they're useful, in the sense that they describe different kinds of stimuli that should exist in a learning environment. Not because they serve the needs of different students, but because they serve the needs to students at different times or in different conditions.
But instead of applying those lessons, Johnson basically uses the findings about VSK to dismiss critics, and spends dozens of pages re-deriving an approximation of Diataxis theory which would have flowed directly from mapping the Kalb model onto forms of technical writing (which, while not quite the same thing as "documentation", is good enough to get to the right conclusions).
It would omit what Johnson calls "lesson plans", but these seem to be basically just the source code for tutorials. And it would omit "textbooks", but I think a lot of these are bad anyway, for many of the same reasons that board game rulebooks are.
I worked on Django documentation and Diátaxis at the same time, so naturally you will see a lot of the same patterns.
People who praise the game by saying "the board teaches you how to play" are technically correct, but I think this glosses over how difficult it is to internalize turn structure before sitting down to play the game.
That being said, it's not the worst game I've ever had to learn. That dubious distinction probably belongs to Wehrle's John Company (scowling at you "Events In India" rules).
Every rule AFAIK is in the Law of Root. So just refer to that. Once you've played once you should never look at the Learn to Play again. The player mats are player aids to remind you of the rules. The fact that rules are duplicated there is a plus, not a minus.
https://www.catan.com/sites/default/files/2021-06/catan_base...
The standard seems to be to start with a setup/quick start guide that walks you through the initial setup and the in-order game loop.
Then have a reference section that goes through all of the specific mechanics (e.g., a deckbuilder might have "then play a card from your hand" in the quick start, and the reference section would go through the various cards available).
Then at the end is a FAQ, that is mostly just all of the rule lawyer stuff.
Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to. Nowadays, you almost always get some form of a cheat sheet card that explains the core game loop, and many rules will be encoded in some way on the game elements themselves.
Now that I think about it, technical writing classes should really take field trips to game stores. There is a lot of impressive that goes into communicating how to play that most people never notice.
As a member of a boardgame club having played to approximately a hundred of less-than-two-years-old games[1] over the past year and a half, I can assure you most boardgames don't, even modern ones.
[1] yes, there are that many games. A few years back there were approximately six hundreds new games being released in a year, for the French market alone (granted it's one of the most dynamic), and I heard it more than doubled after Covid so I don't know where we're at right now.
But many are just variations of a gameplay: Splendor and Century are the same thing (one of some limited actions per turn, most things visible, you buy something to generate resources to buy points). Most cooperative game too: it's either unlock like (escape room) or forbidden island (some objectives and a way to increase the pressure on players).
I wonder if those new players have thousands of sessions of play under their belt or if they are truly new players or with only a few games of experience.
I don't listen much to the explanation of a new game because there are usually too many rules to remember, they resemble parts of some other games (like learning Python when you know Ruby) and I ask questions when I'm playing and (sorry if somebody feels bad about this:) these are not chess or go or backgammon, I'm not expected to study to become good and play thousands of games of them, they are all casual games to me.
All I need to have a decent first game and not score last is identifying a way to score points and play along that line. If I play that game again I will do better (maybe.) If I don't play it anymore it doesn't matter if I invested my attention into its rules.
Then again, maybe it was just that we were all a teensy bit drunk.
Our bafflement was probably enhanced by not noticing the "Learn to Play" booklet initially. Then each of us trying to read a separate booklet, and disagreeing with the others about how to proceed, etc.
I once bought some disk utility software because I had a bunch of files that had accidentally been deleted that I really needed to get back (they were not on backup yet because they were recently created) and was quite happy that in addition to the 200 page exhaustive manual there was also a small booklet whose cover said in big print something like "Read this first if you bought this because you are trying to recover a disk".
That booklet was placed so that it would be the first thing you would see when you opened the box and you'd have to remove it to get to the installation floppies.
And the "basic" game was pretty damned complex to start with.
Now, people are so media saturated that they're begging to remove as much content as possible in order to just get the clearest bit of information. I can't help we've lost something in society when we're not really enjoying or having fun unless we get immediate and overwhelming pleasure triggers.
Have you by chance played Tunic? If not, there is a mechanic you may be particularly interested in. :)
(Just purchased. Easy buy vs. wishlist decision since it's currently half-off on Steam)
At least half the time you get this feeling, they pointed it out with the rest of the rules and you just didn't notice.
Yes, that's also true. But it's still very common that the rule that trips you up was covered beforehand.
The fundamental problem here is that, at the time you're having the rules explained, you're not in a position to know what is or isn't important.
D&D (and many other TTRPGs) have become too Judaic for my liking. You can read the Torah cover to cover, but like any religion you'll inevitably be told you don't actually "understand" it unless you also buy and read the Talmud and all these journals and attended these seminars. Literally "Rules Lawyering: The Game." All these add-ons revising canon and adding some crappy fanfic or art just feel like cheap cash grabs. It's just not good enough for what it costs.
Nintendo never sold you add-ons for the instruction manual expanded universe. Subscribing to Nintendo Power might net you cheat codes or a poster or something--bonus content--but they were never integral to understanding the games.
You of course should pick exactly the same stance on the above as I do. But like any true gentleman I never tell you my stance is.
One example I cited [0] was Asmodee Digital's implementation of Terraforming Mars released in 2018, 2 years already after the physical version of the boardgame became a global hit... yet the digital version had such basic bugs, it wasn't like they couldn't have easily found free (or paid) playtesters to document them. Stupid stuff liked forced delays/ cutscene animations; in particular I heard the mobile interface was unplayable. By all accounts it was several years before it was half-playable. But by then there wasn't much revenue potential left.
It's sad when this happens especially if you're trying to evangelize for a game to your non-hardcore friends, because a bad initial experience can kill the word-of-mouth (like they did with the digital version of Pandemic [1] (delisted in 2022), or things like Essential Phone 1.0, or 'Cyberpunk').
I'd much prefer if studios said "You can buy the beta version now for $14.99, or wait for the general release in 6-12 months for $Y".
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294364
[1]: https://www.ign.com/articles/pandemic-digital-game-removed
Also, the box art and booklet typically had much higher quality than the game. As a single example, look at Mega Man: https://retrovolve.com/an-illustrated-history-of-mega-man-bo...
And then there was a period in the 1990s when the FMV intro had higher quality graphics than the rest of the game.
These situations just don't exist these days. Although, admittedly, some people do buy game books and lore books because they're well illustrated (illuminated?)
I think the decline is kinda obvious… the manual is an expense, most people don’t want to read it, and it’s better to make the game explain its own story and gameplay. 1980s manuals had walkthroughs and explained the story because that kind of functionality was difficult to put in software. Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
It’s wild to look at the Final Fantasy II (you know, FF4) manual from 1991. It has half the story laid out with maps of towns and dungeons, followed by tables of the items and abilities in the game. Meanwhile, you look at Xenoblade Chronicles 3 from 2022. XC3 is absurdly complicated by comparison and has a much larger story, but it is playable without a manual because the game explains how to play as you play it. Somewhere in the middle, in the 2000s, you have the middle option—manuals that give you a list of characters in the story and tell you what all the buttons do.
Archive.org is great for these old manuals.
Worth mentioning is how games like Legend of Zelda were not anticipated to be beatable by ordinary players without help (help beyond what the manual provided). Phantasy Star 2 is in a similar category and I think you were expected to have the strategy guide.
Also worth mentioning is games like SimLife, where the manual is a proper software manual. It also has those weird cartoons about a family playing around with a gene splicer.
> Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
I was able to read the StarCraft manual on the bus to school, car rides, waiting rooms. If the info had been locked in the game itself, in some kind of sub-menu, I never would have read through it, because I was playing the game.
Kind of a fun exercise to think how a modern game would be different. I haven’t played StarCraft II so this is just my take on a modern version of this.
Put some more info into cutscenes and really hammer the important stuff home (repeat it), taking advantage of the higher-quality cutscenes we can make these days. Other info goes in the encyclopedia. Make an encyclopedia mechanic—each entry for a unit is unlocked once you destroy a certain number of those units in-game. Unlocking the entry gives you some slight mechanical advantage, like the ability to see which upgrades the unit has or the exact HP values. Once or twice during the game, design a segment of gameplay that requires you to complete an encyclopedia entry in order to pass.
I’m sure the kids in the 2000s could just play games on the bus.
I certainly played gameboy in the car, until I inevitably got carsick and had to vomit somewhere. Pokemon vs nausea was a tough tradeoff.
"The family that transmogrifies together eats flies together!"
It’s a good thing the games were plug and play in the console back then, I wouldn’t have had the patience to install and download a 3GB patch before starting
I find that many people are so afraid of reading game rules that they'd rather watch 15-30m how to play videos. It's telling of the industry that these videos are typically better learning resources than the rulebooks themselves.
My favorite rulebooks have 1-page rule references at the back or scannable columns on each page that summarize the main text.
As someone who enjoys technical documentation writing, I think board game rulebook writing would be a rewarding experience. Not exactly sure how to get into that field though...
(I have yet to read this in full, but I'm excited to dig in)
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/212516/keyper
And Smartphone, Inc, because the rulebook was bad for looking things up quickly:
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2979178/some-rules-notes-i-...
For me, at least, there is no rulebook or textbook or docs page that is so great that I can learn about something just by reading about it. Unless I can mess with it (even just by writing my own text about it), I will never internalize it.
I looked at Twilight Struggle and was terrified at how thick the book was, but it's really more a reference guide, and each step is laid out in detail, so there were hardly any questions. And if I had them they were easy to find. It's intimidating at first, but in terms of ease? It actually worked really well. But for the most part, yes. Big thick tomes that are full of overly flavored text and lack of examples/references are the worst. I really like when there are player cheatsheets that help explain the flow of the game and common elements to help reduce downtime/asking the "leader"/teacher for info
Not only that, but very nearly every one of them has rules errors. There is exactly one YouTuber (from Watch It Played) who consistently puts out rules-error-free videos. Any and all other video playthroughs, i take with a huge grain of salt.
To make a great rulebook, you probably new two or three diagrams per page for each new concept. So do you have a huge rulebook that is easy to learn from or a small one that is hard to learn from. (The cost and weight factors are pretty negligible.) It also points to the ongoing success of card driven games since you can defer the rules overhead until someone draws the card and they can read the rules themselves as long as the turn structure is fairly simple to jump right in.
Source: I design board games as a hobby and pitch them to publishers.
It's worth noting that "simple" games are not always simplistic, especially when they're head-to-head. I've played thousands of games of Haggis (which for two players could be played with an ordinary deck of playing cards and a notepad to keep score) online, and I can tell you that expert-level strategy gets into some pretty deep thinking.
I've also played thousands of games of Dominion online, and got to a level that I'd consider competent - above what almost any casual player would ever reach, but still awful next to real experts. A lot of people seem to hate that game in the board gaming circles I used to hang out in - a lot of players get the impression that simple strategies beat more complex ones, and the endgame is boring because you most often acquire victory points via otherwise-useless cards that clog your deck. But on a large fraction of possible "kingdoms" (and the random choice of card piles adds a huge amount of variety to the game), there are complex "engines" available that crush the simpler strategies. It's just that you actually have to learn how to implement them, which simply does not flow directly from a mechanical description of what the cards do no matter how well you teach it.
Which is to say, yes, card-driven games have some huge advantages - both when the cards define new rules space (the Dominion / Fluxx / M:tG way), but also just when they're a relatively simple component of an abstract, heads-up, imperfect information game (the Haggis / poker way). The latter benefit, I think, from a higher level of general expertise: children are commonly taught to play various sorts of card games, so they're a very familiar implement that can draw on a lot of powerful design language (set collection mechanics, numerical "ranks" vs symbolic "suits", etc.).
The same can't be said for games like Root. Which may have become more common in recent years, it's about 10 years since I was really into modern board games, so I don't know. But I suspect it's still the case that good designers and experienced publishers write good rulebooks.
But as all programmers know, your mental model of your program is probably full of holes and dubious logic. And so it will often be for board games. Then a technical writer can't save it.
This was way back in the Isotropic days, before there was an official client. So you could play games very quickly without any of the physical card manipulation at all, never mind shuffling. (It was a very minimalist client that didn't try to simulate any of that card movement with animations; it just immediately updated hand and pile contents and resource counts.)
I guess it's really just not for everyone.
(A story: years ago I tried to design my own deck-building board game which borrowed several Dominion mechanics - but you would play out your cards physically like tiles; instead of an action-counting mechanic or an Action/Treasure dichotomy, there were restrictions on what cards could be adjacent to each other. The feedback I got was overwhelming in its consistency: the more it played like Dominion, the less people liked it. But without that anchor I was lost in terms of designing something that made sense and had anything like game balance, and eventually I gave up.)
But even for computer games, after you've played for hundreds of hours of say Civilization, and especially if you approach it competitively, you hardly feel like the Hittites anymore. By then, it's just an abstract game for you, and you're OK with it or you'd have quit long ago.
Do what the author did and start by writing a new rule book for an existing game. You can upload it to BGG and get feedback from players. After doing a few of those, they got contacted by a designer to write one for a brand new game.
I get the sense from the comment section many others here are reacting to the article title and sharing their thoughts on board game rulebooks generally, rather than critiquing the article.
Which is to say, I think you're right. The linked PDF is 150 pages and I think that's discouraged many people from trying to consider the author's ideas. Even though they're presented in a way that seems intended to benefit from (and demonstrate) those very ideas and make the material easier to read, the sheer volume discourages many readers before the first word.
There was a part earlier where Johnson argues:
> That's about 60 years of rulebook design. The 2023 printing of Acquire's rulebook is more readable than any previous printing's rulebook. But each printing of Acquire's rulebook has the same basic structure. The 1960s printing had sections for: objective of the game, game terms, setup, play (playing tiles, buying stock, merging chains), end of the game, and edge cases. The 2023 printing has more detailed rules, more example images, and more tips for new players, but the order and presentation of rules is roughly the same.
... but the 2023 printing apparently runs to 16 half-size pages, where the original rules fit on the underside of the box top. (And from the photo, it appears to make some use of bullet-point lists, too.) And this is apparently a relatively light ruleset compared to the others discussed in the article.
Surely there's some compromise to be made here.
Those videos often gloss over a lot of specific details (e.g. round-up or round-down) and thats fine to gloss over in teaching also. If the first game runs smooth and gives the game experience, they're more likely to play again than if you have to stop and dig through reference multiple times. You can always look it up after so you do the second game more correctly.
It's not that I'm "afraid" of reading game rules, just that I know from lots of experience how rare it is for a (8-25pp) manual to balance explaining the minimal set of mechanics in a fast, comprehensible, logical order, also giving a feel for typical gameplay (even just 2P), and toss in some basic remarks about strategies and tips. Many times my friends and I have invested 1-3hrs in learning something, only to find the gameplay has gotchas by rewarding/punishing quirky things, or is simply broken. Or we have to go to BoardGameArena.com to find basic errata/clarifications/houserules for ambiguity, or the designer's own semi-official clarifications/ version 1.1. So, one guerrilla way to estimate how good/bad the official rulebook is to count the number of (and frustration level in) clarification threads on BGA, or whether an updated rulebook is downloadable, or how many unofficial fan cheatsheets or guides there are on BGA.
One infamous example was the 2010 version of 'Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game' (complexity 3.17/5, rating 7.3) where the physical boardgame implementation was so complex as to be unplayable (6-12+ hrs for a 2P game, I was told); it made the case why the computer version was better for implementing all the bookkeeping; my friend showed me multiple ringbound manuals of gameplay and reference guide and I simply said no (even though I loved the software versions). [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/77130/sid-meiers-civiliz...]
(Then they overreacted too far in the opposite direction with 'Civilization: A New Dawn' (2017) which simplified tech, combat, terrain way too much, down to 5 values each; it gave a huge advantage once you knew which civilizations were OP and which techs sounded useful but were a productivity trap and worth skipping. Like, Aztecs with nuclear weapons (special ability is to reuse that attack every other turn)).[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233247/civilization-a-ne...]
One example of many was the corruption calculation in each cilization every turn based on how remote each city was from the capital, the city population, tax-rate and luxury-rate, the number of military units garrisoned there, modifiers for wonders etc.
I find this goes for everything. People are so afraid of reading they'll watch a 10 minute video for something they could've read in 5. Trouble is reading is something you need to practice and ability will fade away when not used.
I get that game designers want the player to understand all of the rules in a game but it quickly turns into its own game of trying to decipher a huge tome to understand how this game works. We just want to play the game as soon as possible and learn as we go, but tons of rulebooks try to teach you every single mechanic before you move a piece on the board.
My biggest pet peeve with rulebooks by far is how many rulebooks feel like they're written out of order (which is touched on in the book above). I would get to parts that should be simple like moving a character or something similar, but there would be ten asterisks to how it works, each explained in different parts of the book.
Fake example: "Here's the movement phase, where you can move your character! Character movement is determined by your weight, refer to the weight class your character is currently in." Meanwhile, weight classes are explained 30 pages later. Now you're expected to either memorize everything, or bounce around flipping pages left and right in order to go step by step...
But then you play the game and there's the right kind of symbology explaining the rules anyways! There are so many little details on boards of modern games that guide the rules. Doesn't solve tiny parts, but really you gotta figure it out.
I think rulebooks can be way better, but at the same time I think rulebooks are not meant for players, but for whoever is going to teach the game. And that person should sit there and figure it out way before the game starts.
Background: Destiny 2 is a co-op multiplayer FPS, and its pinnacle activity is 6-player raids, which requires players to combine fast-paced FPS gunplay, split-second reaction to mechanics, and coordination and communication with other players. This can be a daunting and overwhelming challenge for players new to the raid, even if they already are experienced in FPS gameplay.
Challenge: explain to a player, familiar with Destiny gameplay but new to the raid, the mechanics of an "encounter" in 5-15 minutes, live. It must be as concise as possible so as not to confuse or overwhelm them, and not stretch the patience of the other players already familiar with the encounter.
Too often I've see players start from the immediate aspects, working forwards towards the later/broader aspects of the encounter, but I find that in the firehose of information, by the time the explanation is complete, the player has forgotten the first, immediately important details: "wait, tell me again what am I supposed to shoot first?"
So the approach I've been experimenting with is to work backwards from the goal of the encounter, so as to finish with the most immediate, tactically important information, so it's freshest in their memory. I don't yet have enough data points to conclude whether this is a better approach ;)
In any case, I'm just barely wading into the immense topic that people have spent decades, careers, and PhDs on: teaching, but it is fascinating the breadth of choices one has in how to approach an explanation.
(I also play a fair bit of board games, and learning a new board game is the primary obstacle of adoption, so I really appreciate the OP author's points)
1. Be Concise! More information is not better, in fact it'll just overwhelm your students
1.a. Some details can be skipped entirely, until they become relevant
2. Repeat The Essentials! Repetition helps memorization, and highlights what's important. Some aspects are more important than others.
3. Visual and practical examples a essential! It's almost entirely useless to explain a subject without context or area to experiment in. Polite nods are your best outcome.
3.a. counter-example, the infamous "sudoers" manpage, so bad there's https://m.xkcd.com/1343/ about it. Start with examples, then generalize, not the opposite!
You may notice some contradiction between points 1 and 2. Yes! Finding the right balance is an art.
The challenge for ADHD geeks like me is to avoid the "train-of-thought" infodumping approach, and filtering for what's really the most relevant.
I very much dislike guides that combine goals and actions in one large, linear instruction set. As soon as there is any deviation, you don't have the high level knowledge to adapt. Sure, I'm supposed to stand on this plate and shoot these 3 things when you say so, but why? Someone died, now the timings are all off. How do I adapt?
If there are key enemies to shoot or whatever I will send a screenshot into discord because the game has no good way to mark targets besides shooting them.
The main reason I like this method is because trying to do the whole fight in one go is just too much to infodump on someone. By the time they are ready for the phase 2 info, they will have enough confidence in the p1 strategy that you dont have to worry about pushing any knowledge out of their active memory.
I was also the raid leader for my WoW guild so the method does scale. You do need people who are able to learn from their mistakes though... Some just never figure out to move out of the fire.
It's such a shame the mobile version is getting pings before desktop
These days I just play monster hunter. No comms needed but you have to learn a weapon up front.
As a datapoint in a similar situation, I played in a guild in Lost Ark that was quite competitive (more than I was). This game has mechanic heavy raids, but I do not know how they compare to Destiny 2. I went into early raids essentially blind and learned mostly by doing and listening to good calls during it.
A few minutes before we went in, and during the straightforward way to the bosses, someone familiar with the mechanics explained the general idea, e.g. "there is an instant kill in all phases, in the first 2 you need to stand on the whitish spots, in the 3rd phase on the reddish spots". During the actual encounters, and before the switch of mechanics, they would call out in short what to do, e.g. "stand in red" or just "red".
I personally liked this way. It gave me a rough idea what to expect and refreshed my memory enough to not screw up in the heat of the moment. The explanation itself was also quite short, because we didn't go through the play by play, only covering the important stuff and relying on in the moment callouts. Plus, some briefing happened during the run to the boss. This method might only work with a somewhat competent/disciplined group. We played like this as a guild with good raid leaders and during crunch time we had good comms discipline. In addition we went into training raids with inexperienced players, with the expectation that we might not make it, but still try our best, and usually won. There also were more or less fixed raid teams that grinded these bosses without any explanation, because everyone had done it multiple times already.
I played another game with lightly mechanics based bosses and I, or someone else, explained in about 3 chat messages what to do when we went in with randoms. It was simple enough "I do X, shoot adds when I do X, if I die, do Y". The experienced players took care of the harder/mechanics parts, everyone else covered the easy parts. If you have a semi-fixed group for this, everyone learns all mechanics at some point by observing.
Edit: Typo
I'm surprised more board games don't include a "first game" playthrough guide to slowly introduce mechanics. This is extremely common in video games.
It also adds extra difficulty to design a game that even has a simple version that is fun to play. Take your Texas Hold'em example, imagine it takes 2 hours to play one game. If you start with a version that has all cards face-up and no betting, people would conclude that Texas Hold'em is a supremely boring game, and wouldn't bother to try the full Texas Hold'em experience!
Naturally, this works better if the 2 hour game consists of dozens of 5 minute turns rather than a few half-hour ones.
If you show one hand of Texas Hold'em, and don't actually play it, but instead talk through what players might be thinking at various points, then you not only cover the mechanics, but sell the game (through the rhetorical device of dramatic irony: you emphasize that the players don't have complete information, and may try to mislead each other, and may come to wrong conclusions even without such deceit, and of course nobody knows what will come on the river...). But of course, it's difficult to disentangle that from a strategy discussion.
I also, when playing a totally new game that no one has played, state up front that we're pretty much going to wing it for a few turns and after that we can see if we want to keep playing or start over.
Start over is often better, and it lets people not worry about getting into an hour-long game where they badly misplayed the first few turns.
A Python language/environment/progression that slowly requires the learner to understand more actual Python rules.
Sleeping Gods also has a bit of a tutorial/quick start that works quite well.
There should definitely be more of it.
1: https://upload.snakesandlattes.com/rules/f/FarmingGameThe.pd...
It’s open source, all the rules have simple markdown formatting that’s easy to glance through on an phone, and they try to be as concise as possible.
But it’s hard work writing rules and I’ve never given it the effort I’d like to.
It comes with the (possibly harder) hard work of managing an open source project though.
My first thought is dedicating an hour or two a month to reviewing, merging, and deploying, but not sure if that'd be accurate.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gmtwebsiteassets/living_r... [ 5MB PDF ]
Once you start getting into _dozens of pages_ to explain the rules, there's no amount of re-organization or quality technical writing that can fix that.
Some people like really crunchy rulesets with lots of rules, and that's fine, but games like that are never going to have an easy teaching or learning experience.
Probably my favorite board game rulebook wasn't a rulebook at all:
Fog of Love has a playable tutorial, where all the cards are setup in a particular order with game rules printed on cards that you draw when you need them. You don't even really need to open the rule book to get through the first game, and it's actually a fairly complex game. The rulebook itself after that is mostly for reference.
But even when the overall goal is either obvious or explicitly stated, it's very common for none of the described options or actions to provide a motivation for the action or option that connects to the goal.
In other words--yes, I can read some rules that say "on your turn, you can draw a BLANKLY card, play a FARB token, or advance one of your MORTGAGED BULLETS on the community barrel."
But why would I do those things? So many rulesets could improved by adding motivation, like "If you think an opponent that owns your MORTGAGE is getting to close to the BULLETPROOF PIT, then you can beat them to the pit by advanced a MORTGAGED BULLET toward the target." Ah! Okay, those are the circumstances under which I might want to do that.
Or, "If you aren't getting enough FARB tokens to block opponents, you might need more of the FARB-earning resources you can get by drawing BLANKLY cards. Remember that you're trying to either build a ROBOT--using parts on some of the FARB tokens--or destroy others' ability to build ROBOTs by shooting them."
The rules of the game aren't really "how you play"; and a newcomer doesn't have a playstyle. You need to mix the basic strategy with the rules instead of just giving a bunch of options and no pointers as to why you might want to do one thing over another.
There is one game I can think of with a fantastic rule book is Azul. But I think that’s partially a symptom of those rules being very simple to explain and really you can only appreciate how complex it can get by playing. A close second is secret hitler thanks to its rules being all over the game itself.
Other games then fall into 2 categories.
Over simplification: an attempt to not bore seasoned players leads to some rules being up for interpretation. This leads to getting through the rule book quickly but annoyances while playing.
Over explaining: to appease everyone they explain every single thing in extreme detail. It’s agonizing to read through and by the time you’re done you forget how the basics in the beginning (like turn order) work. Some address this by there being guides or hints on the board or whatever.
Personally I have become a big fan of games that introduce things piecemeal or have a basic set of rules but then the complexity is dictated by card text.
But that doesn’t work for every game.
Awful in the sense of overly complicated and fiddly. There are plenty of games with deep strategic depth that have been around for hundreds of years and are simple enough that the rules fit on an index card and children routinely learn them from other children in the course of playing.
If you end up with a 20-page rulebook, perhaps the problem is not how best to organize that rulebook, but that you have 18 pages too many rules in the first place.
Exactly. My pet peeve is when a game is launched as a kickstarter and they add new game mechanics as stretch goals. If it was a good game with just the basic mechanics then why on earth would anyone want it be more complicated just because more people have funded it? And from the other angle if it is a better game with the extra rules and mechanics added then why not make that the game? It is the job of the game’s designer to make the very hard choices and tradeoffs between complexity of rules and the fun people will have with them. If they abdicate this responsibility and leave it up to “let’s see how viral our kickstarter canpaing will be” then they don’t understand their task.
If you talk to people in industry, they realize that this is making the games worse, but it's making them sell better. Just like today, just like with a movie, high sales don't come from great mechanics, but franchises or licensing. Your superhero coop game is going to do much worse if it doesn't have a license. Why do we have so many boardgames with video game licenses? Because it sells. There's way too many games in the market right now for even industry insiders to good track of most offerings. Buyers working for large internet game stores are overwhelmed.
So no, game designers are 100% understanding their task, which is to make a game that gets backed and is profitable. Cutting half the game after you told backers what you were doing is a disaster, and it's all those extra rules and extra boards that sold the game in the first place. The fact that the game is shelved after 3 plays is not a problem for them.
My partner loves board games, and one of my takes that drives her nuts is that IMO most board games are better as a computer game where the tedious mechanics are automated. I am certainly an extremist in this way, I believe almost every board or card game ever made is better to play on a computer, but I think we should all be able to agree that a LOT of board games would benefit from automation.
Monopoly is a great example, because basically everyone has at least some understanding of the game and basically no one has ever played it entirely correctly in purely analog form. I have literally never seen anyone do the auctions in real life, mortgaging is rare, and other "house rules" like the pot on "Free Parking" are common. All of these things tend to cause the game to drag on forever, ironically the thing most of those same players will complain the most about.
If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate. Some support the house rules as options, but they have to be enabled and some versions specifically warn that they will break the game.
Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework.
In industrial safety one of the mantras is that if it's easier to do it wrong than right people will definitely do it wrong, so you need to make the right path also the easy path, sometimes changing entire systems or processes to make it that way. I believe the same logic should be applied to gaming. If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game.
My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.
OTOH, creating a computer game is not a trivial task, and I don't see a good way to do it for 6 people Face-to-Face with some hidden information like a card hand. Would it be good if a complicated diplomatic game with hidden info like Republic of Rome https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1513/the-republic-of-rom... were available on computer, and everyone had their own device making it easy to see their hand / interact? Absolutely! But that's not a realistic option.
I would agree with "If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game." but think you may be underestimating serious gamers' ability to play complicated games correctly and still have fun. Agree that you really want to try to minimize tedious bookkeeping, though.
I may well be an outlier, though - I actually read the rules of Monopoly as a kid and we did auctions and mortgaging...
I've long thought the "Jackbox Games" model would be absolutely perfect for board games. The board goes on a TV, a tablet, or for the really dedicated a screen built in to their gaming table and each player's hand/deck/whatever displays on their phone through a browser-based client.
If I were a frontend programmer I'd have taken a whack at it.
> but think you may be underestimating serious gamers' ability to play complicated games correctly and still have fun.
My experience fits with something mentioned in the article, a lot of serious gamers are not in fact playing their games correctly but they just don't know it. I said this in another one of my replies but I'll repeat it here, I have rarely played a complicated (read: more than a page of rules to be understood for proper play) game with my partner's board game crew without discovering some way that they were playing it wrong half way through the game. These are people who meet every week at a board game bar to play board games, go to board game conventions, and a few of them even make and sell their own games.
No it isn't, because board game people hate it. I don't know who is defending Monopoly, but it's not board game fans.
> If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate.
Sure. It still doesn't make for a fun game though.
> Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework.
Sure. But good games avoid tedious tasks to start with. If anything I'd say the converse is true: most computer games would be improved by trying to make a board game version and cutting the mechanics that make that difficult.
> My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.
If "gameplay" was the only thing that mattered then all games would be abstract games. And even abstract games often have a tactile part of the experience that creates its own feel. Every computer game is kind of the same - you sit in front of a screen and push keys - and that limits how much you can get out of it; there are no great novels about computer gaming.
It's a great example because almost everyone discussing this topic understands the game and its flaws in physical game form, and most of us have probably played at least one digital version over the years.
Also board game people are the same people quoted in the article as saying that bad rulebooks were in fact great, so their judgement may not exactly be the best. Enthusiasts of any category tend to be able to ignore a lot of flaws in their favorite thing as long as the thing they like about it works. I'm a car enthusiast, and there are a lot of us who absolutely love objectively bad vehicles just because of one unique quirk that happens to make us smile.
> Sure. It still doesn't make for a fun game though.
Right, but it takes a lot of the parts that actually ruin most physical plays and solves their problems.
> Sure. But good games avoid tedious tasks to start with.
Remembering a book full of rules and what applies when is a tedious task. If the game requires players have a grasp on a substantial rulebook for basic play it is not avoiding tedious tasks.
That's what's great about computer versions of board games, the computer handles that part and players are only able to do things that are allowed. You never have to remember what you can do when, and more importantly never have to decide between unwinding multiple turns worth of gameplay, just rolling with it, or throwing away the entire session when inevitably someone gets it wrong.
There is exactly one game I've played with my partner's board game crew where I didn't discover some way they were doing it wrong, and that's Everdell which has a very well done computer version that they regularly play as well as physical, so they've been forced to learn how the game actually works instead of how they think it works.
> If anything I'd say the converse is true: most computer games would be improved by trying to make a board game version and cutting the mechanics that make that difficult.
I wouldn't disagree with that, but the fact remains that computers allow more complicated mechanics to be implemented without increasing the cognitive load on the players or increasing the odds of a game-breaking misunderstanding.
Did correcting the others make them more fun?
I don't generally find correcting others fun, unless they don't take it well and make a scene about it in which case that can certainly be some delicious schadenfreude. That doesn't happen with the game group, they're generally receptive.
I think the games probably got more fun though. Presumably those rules are there for a reason, and it's not like I'm staring at the rulebook the whole time. I either had a question come up as a part of gameplay the group couldn't answer confidently or something didn't feel right about how the game was playing so I checked and found what I found. On more than one occasion this has led to someone else in the group pointing out some other related element they had found weird until then.
1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy.
I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.
To the ones who want human designed things chess is like this vast procedurally generated forest that just has trees everywhere with different branch layouts, so you have to climb them in different ways.
For the card game Hearts I would say something like:
"I will give a 20 second explanation, and then go into more detail in a second pass.
Hearts is a trick taking game. In Hearts players take turns throwing cards into a pile. Depending on which cards are placed in the pile, one player will take the pile, and that player will get some points. Points are bad, the objective of the game is to avoid getting points. Now let's just play through a mock round, it will only take a minute or two..." Etc.
I've given some thought to this, because I've often had games explained to me and the explainer is going deep into the rules about some game mechanic before I even know what the objective of the game is. I also know that people's minds work differently, and so maybe my high-level-first approach is confusing to others.
Any advice on how to teach the rules for a new game?
* Hearts is a card game
* Hearts is a card game with tricks
* In Hearts, winning tricks is bad, you want others to win tricks.
* In Hearts, you win tricks by...
(e.g. turns out I don't know what a trick is, so while you're explaining the nuance of tricks and going into more ad more detail, I'm waiting for you to explain what a trick is getting more confused and frustrated.).
You aren't aware of what concepts are confusing, or how many weird words/concepts you can pile on before someone just disconnects.
I've often thought multiple passes over a topic, beginning with a short pass, and giving more details in each subsequent pass, is a good teaching method.
I haven't done it much myself though, and I haven't seen it done by others very often. I wonder if it really is a good teaching method in practice?
The final step should naturally lead you into the finer nitty-gritty as players are ready.
It depends on the game and the people involved. IMO it's easiest when you're familiar with the group and can use terminology they can understand. The phrase "trick taking" is a likely no-no, and I'd rather say something like "Spades is like Hearts except blah blah blah" if the group is already familiar with Hearts but doesn't know what Spades is.
And if people don't know what Hearts is, just describe it in plain language. Like for the points I might say something like "higher points are bad, kind of like golf", as most people understand what golf is.
Once people are actually playing the game then 1) They will be having fun, which is the whole point of board games 2) They can ask you anything they don't get, and you can make sure that they actually understand 3) It will force you to explain mechanics in a logical order that gives people information only when they need it and can actually use it
For Hearts I would probably just deal a hand to each player, maybe face up, and go from there
Just as an FYI: from the perspective of someone who very rarely plays card games this sentence is absolutely incomprehensible. The explanation would have been better without it. (For me.) It leaves me thinking what the heck a trick might be. I know card tricks where a magician asks you to pick a card and then things happen and later they magically identify the card. Or i know “tricking” people in the bluffing with card sense. But the heck would anyone “take” any of the above? Maybe the goal is that someone will bluff and we are supposed to “take it” as in believe othes bluffs and that is somehow the game? Oh but now from the description it sounds the goal is to not “take” the points so then isn’t that a “trick not-taking” game? Or a “trick forcing” as in the active thing is to force others to take the “trick” when they would rather not?
Board game geeks do this often. They have seen so many games before that they learned to identify patterns in the rules and they learned names for those patterns. They say something like “this is a pool bulding, hidden movement game with the added twist that your blurbs can smorg on backturns too, let’s play”. Which is fine, as long as they play with other board game geeks. But if they also want to play with us non-boardgamegeeks these sentences confuse more than explain. Because i might be just sitting there trying to figure out where will i find water for my pool, when actually what they meant… i don’t even know what they meant. Same way as i have no clue what is a trick and why would anybody taking it in the game you are describing.
(and, of course, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/)
Funnily, enough: <https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic>
You'll find "trick-taking" in that list.
It clarifies a lot for those who know what it means, and for those who don't know, the remainder of the explanation proceeds without assuming they know what it means.
The modern, kickstarter heavy 3 hour monstrosity just can't assume that the buyer has played all the games that have the same mechanics they are basically lifting from elsewhere, while only explaining the 2 or 3 places where they are doing anything interesting. But when you go through lives rules explanations among people in industry, half of the rules are really handled by reference, because you know what is going on. With some designers, the rules are almost unnecessary, as the played aids and the graphic design do 90% of the work. I've played that game with a certain designer: He sat there to answer questions, but he didn't even hand us a rulebook, or provide an explanation. Just the components in front of us and 'figure it out', as an experiment on the game's learnability
Mechs vs. Minions is another one that does this iterative process of teaching.
This article looks great, I'll continue to read it.
I haven't read all this yet, so maybe he touches on it. The point about interconnecting pieces or like "gears" that are all involved is a good thing. Everything is dynamic and in interplay.
A lot of that means these are not linear systems (not in a systems theory sense, but textual sense). Graphics and images do volumes. But only so much as you understand, again, the WHY. Everything has to feed into the "economy" of the game and how all the parts interact.
Rulebooks also need to make sure terminology is consistent. I've played some games where I see a word that's used, and then I try to find the definition and it's just... not there. At least not easily found. An index of some sort is necessary if you're going to use special terms that aren't obvious (and if they are obvious/standard words, but you use them in a unique way, also define that).
I think there should be: 0. Intro/thematic vibe/core concept - the what you are trying to do and possibly why. 1. Component Overview - the what you are playing with. (Include a layout of the setup version of the game). 2. Step by step rules, underlined words that have specific definitions to be referred in the index. 3. Examples are ideal (including images), especially in tricky situations that involve edge cases (or worse, corner cases) 4. Common "edge cases" (oxymoron?) that are trickier should have their own FAQ/addendum for clarification. 5. Glossary/Index
Rules should not try to be cute and invent words for common scenarios unless it's clear what it means in context.
Rules should NOT try to be super thematic. A little flavor text at the beginning is fine, but like the above issue, there should not just be things like "Grippledize the phlumoxor to gain 10 boodiboos" Just say "place your character piece at location 3 in order to gain 10 units of currency" or whatever.
If you're going to use terms like that - use them on the cards as flavor text, not hinge the rules on understanding them; or if you're going to be cute with names, be consistent with it, and constantly use it so it's etched into the brain "OK, Grippledizing means Place at a spot" - if it's just a one off thing there is no need for a "cute" name for it. This is similar to how some science fiction loves just inventing words for things that already have perfectly cromulent terms.
This a million times. It drives me nuts when you're trying to learn a new game, and it's only at the very end that it explains what condition results in winning.
Like, if you'd started with that, reading the rules would have made a LOT more sense.
Excepting those with particular types of autism, this is the core of how all learnings works. Explain to humans the problem, describe the tools to solve the problem, let humans learn on their own how to overcome the problem.
But the goal of these rulebooks is not to aid the largest number of people in efficient learning, but to draw scrutiny from the least number.
Another bad one was the travel version of Azul, which assumes you have already played the full size version.
Don't get me started on One Deck Galaxy...
I love both games, though.
Our first playthrough of a new board game usually ends up being 2x longer than the average game time listed on a box, mostly due to how long the rule book is.
My thought is that you basically need every rulebook to have an MVP - what is the fastest way to get players to start their first game. If that takes longer than 45 minutes, it's a pretty big drawback. If it takes an hour - it's a game design failure.
It's also the reason why we keep coming back to the same classic board games - Marvel, Battlestar Galactica, Carcassonne, Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy. We already know the rules and it's so much easier to pick it back up with a simple refresher.
The linked article has numbered sections, which is nice, allowing for specific references like "in Section 2.3" or "Figure 14.4", but the example rulebooks discussed from what I can tell do not.
I agree that in practice lots of explainer videos waste a ton of time with intros and such, but thirty seconds of good video can easily replace ten minutes of reading and re-reading.
[EDIT] Put it another way: if you're trying to decide whether to get a game, do you read the rule book? I'd put that after videos of play, which are by far the most useful thing for this, followed by written first-time play AARs (a huge step down from a video, but serviceable), followed finally and distantly by the rule book. This is entirely because getting a sense of how a game actually plays from a rule book is hard and slow.
I loath, loath, loath videos, for "teaching" anything. For basically all types of information.
I find the pacing to be terrible, and even if people talk as fast as I read, I absorb almost nothing from watching people play games.
I can't tell if other people are just slow readers, if they absorb visual information much better than me, or what.
Apparently everyone on Board Game Geek agrees with your side of the ledger, in that most board games have ~2 text reviews of the game and dozens of video reviews, but I basically pretend the videos don't exist.
Yes, I bought spirit island since I liked the rules after reading them online. They were so simple yet fun.
> I'd put that after videos of play, which are by far the most useful thing for this
In a video you wont understand what happens though since you don't know the rules, you are just seeing them move around tokens on a board with little context. I don't see how you can understand if the game is fun or not based on that. It is like evaluating a computer based on watching a video of someone using it over reading the specs, nobody does that you read what it does instead.
It takes a hour long lecture to explain a concept that you can learn reading 5 minutes in a book, reading is much faster at getting information, watching takes less effort but also gives you much less understanding.
I liked the idea so much when I learned Spirit Island with my kids we watched videos first before diving into board setup - which was quite complex.
There’s not a lot of rule depth.
You couldn’t do the same with risk or kill dr lucky for instance
I would compare the experience to being lost in a class, failing the first test, but just hoping you'll be able to learn enough by semester's end to pass. It's not easy, explaining all the ways things influence each other and cross-contribute. But thinking about it in a structured way can only help.
Overall if you just run a few games you will pick it up as you think through the implications of rules. My main complaint is that the recommended starter decks hide several mechanics so you end up reading all these rules that dont even apply at first.
There's good documentation in the software world, but it's always for systems shaped as to have all the incentives align to having good, current documentation. Stripe has good docs, because that's part of being able to onboard people: Bad docs cost money. Postgres has good docs because it doesn't change that much, so the good documentation stays useful, and they have a quick loop between finding errors and fixing them.
Your typical internal project has awful documentation because it's nobody's real job, the requirements change constantly, and not enough people would use the documentation in the best of times to make good documents a worthwhile investment.
And if you ask me, the SPI wargames aren't exactly pinnacles of good rulebook writing. If anything, the similar shape came from the games themselves having similar bones, more than because the system was good, or because standardization helped.
This is always frustrating because the person usually drones on about the part you understand, until eventually you stop paying attention,but spends ten seconds on the complex part.
There was a trend 10ish years ago where the best games actually came with two rulebooks. One was a book designed to walk you through your first game, and the other was a reference book. They worked really well, but I can imagine they were a pain to develop.
The hallmark of a good rulebook is that there is a section in the back that has commonly missed rules or details. Besides being extremely helpful, it's a good signal that the rulebook has actually been tested.
Another "green flag" is if the rules include strategy tips - vomiting rules on me doesn't necessarily help me understand how I am supposed to experience the game.
https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1nkHWqYre86...
I don't relate well to reading rules although I'm quite good at picking up on the "exceptions" to rules e.g. you can only own two twizzles unless you've unlocked the fandangle. What works for me is playing an example round/turn to see how the various mechanisms fit together. One problem I find with game rules is when they introduce a term without the corresponding picture of the card/token etc.
> DeCoster: Now, in Euchre, there's a rule for that. It's called a renege. The other team gets two points, and you just play a new hand. Fine. But, in Wizard, which is my favorite trick taking game, there is no way to handle that situation.
> Rubin: Not, at least, officially in the rules.
> DeCoster: We've been trying to come up with a way, but there's no official way. There's no rule that says if someone reneges, do X, Y, and Z. And, in fact, by the nature of the game, it's very difficult to come up with a fair way to resolve that situation. So the game actually has... It's like a video game that has a glitch: go into this one spot, the game crashes, and your save file disappears. The same thing can happen in Wizard. (DeCoster & Rubin, 2016, 41:33–42:06)
But https://www.usgamesinc.com/Wizard-FAQ.html says:
> 30. What happens if a player reneges (i.e. does not follow suit when required to do so)?
> If noticed before another card is played, no penalty.
> If trick is completed and the mistake then discovered, players automatically make their bids except the player who reneged loses 20 points.
My favorite rulebook is Stationfall. There is a dedicated rulebook for fun lore and general tips; a set thing for walking through a game, and two copies of the dry legalese.
Attempts to translate that into extensive game walkthroughs in manuals (not quick examples of play to demonstrate a rule, which are sometimes nice) are horribly misguided. Just include a damn QR code that points to a YouTube video. Give it an entire page to make it more likely the players find it, that'll still be less space than a walkthrough.
I truly think Monopoly's around the upper end of complexity that normal people can be expected to absorb and apply from a game manual—not from someone showing them the right way, or from a video—which means the vast majority of modern-era games are way past that point. I've known more people who fail to play with all parts of the Monopoly rules than I've known people who correctly play with all of them (or at least know the rules, but affirmatively reject or deliberately modify them) by a large margin. Usually it's auctioning or mortgaging they skip, either because they never read the rules and learned from someone who wasn't familiar with those parts, or because they did read the rules but deemed one or both of those parts too daunting to play and manage without having seen a demonstration of it and decided the game seems like it can run without those rules (yes, it can, but it makes it worse in some key ways—not doing auctions when someone declines to purchase a space is especially harmful, as it prolongs the game without much in the way of compensatory extra fun)
Like, sure, Risk is kinda a shitty grand strategy or area control or war game or however you want to classify it, for demonstrable, if arguable, reasons, but if your answer to that results in more complex rules than Risk... you're gonna need an explainer video, because your rule book is definitely gonna suck. Because that's a game normal people can, just barely, often figure out and run correctly just from the rule book, and yours surely won't be.
Keep the rules, but ditch any lengthy written blow-by-blow account of a session of the game. They're painful to read and not terribly illuminating. The motivation is to replicate the sort of thing a video's good at, to make the rulebook a self-contained teaching device—"if watching a round of play is so useful, why don't we put that in the book!"—but it's just not gonna work. You need a video, someone to explain it to you, setting up the game and stepping through a couple fake turns with yourself, close reading of the rules with some note-taking and re-reading, that kind of thing. In short, you need a teacher (in person, or video) or good application of study skills. There is a Royal Road, but it's the former options (videos, teachers who already know the game) and you're not going to bring that to the rule book in just about any case that needs such a thing.
What's wrong with that? Genuinely asking. It sounds useful to people trying to learn, and easy to skip if you've already learned.
When I’m reading through a rulebook I want to browse headers to find the concept I want, and then read the text.
Here is the particular book if you’re curious: https://awakenrealms.com/images/download/ISS_Vanguard/Rulebo...
Beautiful book. Needlessly confusing. Shame also on them for spending 3.5 pages on how to roll dice, excluding the example. It’s like an ADHD pit trap. You’re reading it and it’s hard to remember what the hell you’re reading. For example you may find yourself on the example of the track progression call out box. Which was related to what again? You might assume it’s the text above about died with two icons, but it’s actually the higher level header on the previous page. Which was step 7 of the dice roll check, which you could easily be confused by because it sure sounds like it should be part of step 8 of the dice roll check: mark outcomes; which begins by telling you not to do this if you had a track progression.
Ridiculous frankly. Also largely game specific. But screw you Paul grogan. You had one job, whoever you are.
But I’ve been watching Paul’s Gaming Rules! channel [1] for several years now, and regard him highly for not just writing rules, but also his YouTube content.
Re: On Mars, I’m curious to see what the author points out as critiques, because I felt like it was really well done. The game is a beast, and I think it would be hard to put together a rule book for such a game without it being a complex task.
But I feel like most complex games (heavier weight — 3.5+ according to BGG’s scale) are hard to learn by rules alone, and these days watching a teach on YouTube — or, even better, a playthrough — really helps with these heavier games.
To the OP’s (likely) point, maybe rules alone should be enough? I mean, how else are the YouTube content creators going to learn! :)
But I think for heavier games, no amount of rules wordsmithing will allow people to learn them without some fumbling and in-game rules referencing… and still getting some of them wrong.
Also, if interested, there is a blog on BGG by the OP, with more discussion there. [2]
[1] https://youtube.com/@gamingrulesvideos
[2] https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/13453/blogpost/164134/every-b...
The problem is, baking bread is such a sensual activity.
You need to understand what it feels like when the texture of the dough is right. You need to learn how to fold and stretch the dough and shape it in ways that are very difficult to describe. None of this translates well into English, no matter how good of a writer you are. And photos are of limited utility.
Learning in person from a knowledgeable teacher is ideal. Just as with a board game.
But, since we are talking about media here, what helped me the most with bread baking was Instagram. I watched videos of bakers doing each stage of the process and talking me through it. I saw the texture of the dough they were using, and how they worked it.
I learned by example.
And I wonder if board games are similar to bread.
Would I rather read a 70-page rule book, or watch someone play the game for a while or teach it to me in a video?
I'd prefer the video content, and then I'd want rulebook as a reference guide rather than a tutorial.
When reading a good rule book/instruction manual I get little moments where the respective explanations click.
But I assume everyone has a preferred method that works for them and has a similar experience when learning.
Watching someone try to learn the rules will tell you exactly where the rulebook is too complicated, doesn't introduce something at the right time, doesn't reiterate something that needs reiterating, doesn't emphasize something enough, etc.
I've had the best luck with explaining games that have short rule sets. Anything more than 4 pages and you really need the multiple sets of rules paradigm, and a good tech editor to make sure the playthrough instructions are accurate with the reference instructions. It's my personal choice, but I also don't care for the games where there's enough stuff going on that it's easy to skip things that are important to balance the game; but there's certainly a balance --- I want a game where there's enough chance that anyone could win, but enough skill that I feel like I can still do well even if chance is against me, and I strongly prefer games where everyone is engaged until the end.
I also don't think the playtester bias to be particularly bad for this. You'll miss some stuff because your playtesters will usually be a lot better than average at reading rules. But nearly everyone stumbles in visible ways on rulebooks, and the fixes for an experienced playtester stumbling tend to be simplifications / clarifications that are even more useful to inexperienced players.
From a technical standpoint, too many technical writers (much less game designers writing rulebooks) lack the tools or understanding to single-source content and consistently reuse it in multiple places. A lot of rulebooks are written and designed as if repeating content is the greatest of sins, but for a game in play, _the last_ thing you want to do is make someone flip to referenced pages. You know what the text should be, just reprint it consistently where it's relevant.
But then this reveals that the problem is often inherent in a game's physical design. If a game has several discrete rules that must be frequently cross-referenced or repeated, those rules should move out of a physical book and onto cards or discrete handout items. And indeed, in my experience doing that has been the effective endgame of the "rulebooks are reference documents that lack the searchability of a reference document" complaint from this essay's writer: rather than having a comprehensive, organized, searchable reference document, find ways to move the rules into the game. Even better: find ways to move the actions allowed by the rules into the physical actions of interacting with the game, such that you don't need words to describe them.
The essay instead suggests borrowing or informing structures from textbooks and lesson plans, but the pragmatic answer isn't to make a new, better kind of game-teaching book, it's to make the rules more accessible _within the medium of the game itself_, of which the rulebook rarely or never is. The best reference guide is the one that doesn't exist because the designers recognized that it shouldn't and designed the game appropriately. The second-best is one that's integrated into the game or board as a component.[1]
In other words, and against the essay's conclusion, the necessary text to run a board game _should_ fit on the inside of the box lid: who can play, how to set it up, and how the components embody the rules. The board and components themselves should be the best, and ideally only, required documentation after that.
But that's also a fundamental design problem in games. This essay proposes a way to make a better band-aid for that self-inflicted wound, but it would be best if designers thought about how to avoid it, and that can only happen when you have know-nothing playtesters crack the box open for the first time. Alas, much of modern game design is so dense and maximalist that if you shipped a game that didn't require a dense rulebook to play, people would knee-jerk react as if the game was too simple or just awful.
1: One of my favorite recent board games is That Time You Killed Me, a time-travel-themed game with a complex conceit. It incorporates the manual as part of the game's progression, and it's flavorful, tells a story, is aesthetically pretty, and builds its rules upon itself at each step. It does few of the things advised in this essay, and if it did more of them, I think I might like the game less.
https://gamers-hq.de/media/pdf/aa/31/ef/TTYKM_Rules-min.pdf is the reference guide and core tutorial; it's 12 pages long, most of it art. The rest of the rules are in the spoiler-filled chapters not part of that PDF, each of which introduces new rules alongside a separate sealed box of new components.
You need to have a proposed solution in order to playtest or evaluate, and if you start in a bad place you're not going to iterate your way out of it.
Does anyone know if this has been researched?
I think the biggest challenges you’ll face is that most rulebooks are simply poorly written and that many games aren’t well designed. Add to this that many modern board games are sold on FOMO models, where you get a lot of additional crowdfunding exclusive rule addons, and it’s just a mess.
The best way to get good rules would probably be to get them digitally and have a LLM refine them for you though. Not only could you fix some of the bad writing, you could also ask for things like reference sheets or whatever you want.
There is, it is called computer code. Board game rules aren't written that way for a reason.
Most board games.
Star Fleet Battles is basically a computer game written on paper 10 years before home computers had enough RAM for the rule set.
The result is what you may expect, each "turn" takes 60-90 minutes and the game lasts 3-4 turns, and every box on this ship diagram actually does something: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/camo/45ff4f9cf11f36cafd7768931a...
1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1blJZCDK2A8DC6f6akcCcQ9_M...
2. https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/190653/holistic-summaries...
For well-established board games, the best solution is to watch an intro video and then play a few rounds using an online version like BGA if it's available.
For non-well established board games, someone with some pedagogical chops has to bite the bullet and read the whole manual and then teach it, in little pieces, to folks during an example playthrough.
There is a weird conceit among some board gamers that you can know what the hell you're doing on a first playthrough. For any moderately complex game or beyond, of course you cannot possibly know much about how to play much less what strategies to use. This is why I don't like playing games once or very infrequently.
That said, some people love to figure out complex rules, and that can be a part of the game experience.
Lots of use of tags and other capitalized technical terms. Information presented roughly in the order you would program them.
Excellent on the technical end but also understandable.
And a good rulebook has pictures/ examples too.
Lancer does a great job of also presenting mechanics in the order you’ll encounter them. High-level abilities aren’t available till late game and the new mechanics they introduce only become relevant late game. So they’re later in the book.
(and if you actually follow the rules the game ends in a reasonable amount of time)
Computers are much better in enforcing every arbitrarily complex rule/mechanic and there is no need to get into any rule lawyering disputes.
Also, I can avoid any boring/time consuming stuff like counting tokens, points, scores, roads etc.
I think those ideas could probably be presented much more tersely. But I'm in the middle of putting up with a 150-page PDF, not so much because I'm engaged with the material, but because I want an excuse to spend a large amount of time thinking about it.
... Which tracks a lot with the start of section 2.2, actually. I could engage on these ideas in my own time and not feel like the author is wasting mine as I read. But the important thing is that I do engage with them at all; they'll stick because I'm actively processing them, just like in the experiment in Spielman et al.'s book.
Another interesting connection I notice here is that Kalb's model of experimental learning seems to map very neatly onto the Diataxis model for writing documentation (https://diataxis.fr/).
(You read the Book of History)
(No, really! Read the Book of History!)
Often times when I buy a kitchen appliance it has some basic info on all of the functionality and perhaps a nice recipe book. Vitamix stood out here, and Breville is mostly okay but could be better.
Power tools though. Dewalt has a folded up piece of paper in micro-font that has technical diagrams that are hard to read and understand. And forget about something like a "recipe" book for simple projects (even if it could be an upsell for another tool.)
Then, it explains the small details of the scoring system. Since you know how the whole game basically works you can mentally hang the smaller rules onto the overall game system.
It reminds me of Jeremy Howards Fast AI course. He teaches "the whole game" with some of the details skipped. Then, he adds details one by one so you never get lost. The analogy often used is teaching sports to children. You start with a simplified version of the sport (For soccer: kick the ball into the other goal) and then you add extra rules (out of bounds, off-side, penalties etc) when they come up.
So if you like knowing how the game you play works then board games is such a breath of fresh air compared to computer games where so many mechanics are black boxes that you have to reverse engineer to figure out what they do because they aren't described anywhere.
Like, exactly how does armor reduce damage? How do defense affect chance to get hit? When does this conditional effect apply? All such things are often very opaque etc in computer games, since they don't have to describe them to you to make the game playable, and that makes it extremely frustrating to try to learn the game, you can play the game but you can't make any decisions since you don't know what anything does.
Even worse, computer game tooltips and manuals often lie to you, giving you the wrong numbers or describe it in a different way than it was coded so it doesn't do what it says it does. A very common example is percentages, what is 150% damage bonus? Sometimes it adds 50% damage, sometimes it adds 150% damage, you never really know and sometimes the same game uses both versions. That never happens in board games since the written text is the implementation.
I've found the most important thing to be the order in which I present information, and the best approach to be layered, like an onion. Essentially, I give them a broad overview of everything, then I do it again but with more specifics, then again with even more specifics, etc. Each layer provides context that will make it possible/easy to understand the specific details that I'll be explaining in the next layer.
This runs counter to how most people and rulebooks explain the rules. Usually they try to group related facts together, e.g. "Here's all the rules for movement," "Here are all the rules for scoring," etc. That's great as a reference for people who are trying to look stuff up. But it's horrible for a beginner, because (as the linked PDF explains) it ignores cognitive load. It gives people information that only makes sense in context, but it doesn't give them that context, so they don't understand it. So they're forced to say, "Fine, I don't understand these details yet, but I'll just hold them in my short-term memory while I continue to read the rules until I get some context that helps me understand." But our short-term memories can only hold a few items, and they usually start to overflow pretty fast, long before the rules add the missing context we're hoping for.
It's the equivalent of telling someone, "Hey, remember this number: 1823. And remember this number: 9094. Don't worry, I'll tell you later why you need them. But first, remember 6642, too. And 11456. Got it? Okay, just a few more things…"
Ugh.
Here's how I explain stuff instead:
1. Start with the goal/objective. For example, "The goal is to be the first to get to 10 points." The goal is the most important context there is! Without it, people have no idea why they should do anything you explain, which means they won't fully understand anything you explain, because "why" is one of the most important parts of understanding.
2. Explain the general flow of the game in simplified terms, and connect it to the goal. For example, "It's a free-for-all, not a team game, so you're trying to get to 10 points by yourself. We're going to go around in circles where we each get a turn. On your turn you'll take some actions that try to help you score points, or at least set yourself up to get closer to scoring points. Then once you decide you've done everything you can, you end your turn, and it moves clockwise to the next person."
3. Discuss the mechanics of how to win, i.e. how to accomplish the goal. For example, "So how do you get to 10 points? Mostly, you can build buildings in this game that are each worth points, usually 1 or 2 points. So the most basic way to win is to gather resources and build lots of buildings. But usually that's not enough to get you all the way to 10 points. So in addition to buildings, there are a few special bonuses and cards you get can get that can also give you 1 or 2 points and push you over the edge to 10 points. I'll explain those later."
By now, the players have heard the goal of the game repeated three times, they understand the basic flow, and all they've even been vaguely introduced to some strategies, details, and mechanics. With each step, they have more high-level context that makes the specifics I reveal later much easier to understand. (By the way, the game I'm explaining in this example is Catan.)
4. Keep explaining things recursively. Always explain a goal/strategy, so people know why they're acting, before you explain the mechanics of how to do that action.
This has always worked fairly well for me. It's essentially just respecting the "curse of knowledge," which you do by accepting the implications of the fact that your listeners don't know what you know.
(I'm in a slow connection and have a fair amount of disdain or something that's probably 20 x the size it needs to be)
Like, should start with a "quick start overview" about here's how the process looks, etc.?
Intelligent sequencing of rules and breaking apart chunks with good leading words and provided diagrams allows the second set of users to speed through their skimming while reducing cognitive load to new players.
How Do We Fix the Rulebook? My first answer is: I don't know!