The Farming Game rulebook[1] authors must have taken this list as a "how to" guide because it is by far the worst I have ever encountered. They intermix rules with some narrative meaning one has to parse a lot of words to extract which ones are relevant to getting started with the game and what actions are legal during play. It'd be like if those infamous recipe blogs intermingled the SEO content in between baking instruction steps
Reminds me of competitive programming, a la Codeforces or IOI, where you solve incredibly challenging algorithmic problems that are wrapped in some silly story about a cow in a garden or something. (In my opinion, that is part of the challenge and fun!)
Galaxy Trucker takes this one step further. The first half of the narrative includes only partial explanations of most rules, with the missing details filled in later (still in narrative form), so you have to refer to two locations for any given rule. It makes for a decent tutorial, but it's a terrible reference.
There is really too much here to summarize. It's a 150 page guide to technical writing, as in the writing of technical manuals, using a variety of board game rulebooks the author wrote as examples. I am only 15 pages in, but so far I have to say the boardgame approach with all its images makes this a much more fun read then any other guide I have seen for writing manuals. It is just about writing though. I don't think you'd gain much if you are just a general boardgame fan looking for a behind-the-scenes look at rulebook creation (if that is even something people look for??)
Ironically these two comments seem to indicate a guide to technical writing, that did not view technical writing itself as a technology which they were writing about?
Like, should start with a "quick start overview" about here's how the process looks, etc.?
Board game rulebooks are documents that need to cater to multiple audiences including both new players learning from the rulebook and experienced players looking to skim through for very specific interactions they have forgotten. They also often refer to a system where there's a high degree of infomational dependence.
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.
I feel like they mostly don't playtest the rulebook very much, and that doing so would get it in great condition.
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.
It's hard to playtest a rulebook, because you need to get fresh players every time, if you want to optimize for the out of box experience (which I think you should!). But also, I think selection bias for playtesters is going to give you testers who are willing to dig through complex rule interactions, and that might not be everyone.
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.
In my experience, it is not that hard to get a stream of fresh playtesters. Maybe I'm just fortunate.
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.
Fresh players are easy, just go any college and put up some posters. $minimum wage to try a new game - it isn't a good deal if you are into money, but if you ensure they have fun and have some beverages they will do it anyway. If someone is really good at something you know who to make an offer to.
This is my top comment. Some designers I've worked with are so obsessed about playtesting and tuning individual mechanics or systems that the never actually playtest the full game flow with no-knowledge players also _running_ the game.
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.
Just about the only innovations in board games per se that I've seen, that've made them easier to play, are increased focus on helpful iconography, and more widespread use of "cheat sheets" (cards, little cardboard bits with print on them) for each player. Not every game uses them, and not every game uses them well (the iconography, especially) but damn is it ever nice to sit down to a game you haven't touched in a year and find that just glancing over the player cheat-sheet and icons on the games' various bits is enough to refresh your memory of the rules well enough to present it to newbies again, leaving maybe just a few details of initial set-up to be looked up in the rulebook (and sometimes the really good ones sneak those onto the cheat sheets or graphic design of e.g. the board!)
Usability studied are not about finding solutions, they are about finding where your solution works/doesn't work. There are too many places where creative solutions are not usable, and so you need to send your creative people back to the drawing board.
I'm learning Conquest and Netrunner now. I kind of half-understand Conquest now, and as for Netrunner, lol. One day. So this is very relevant to me.
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.
My nephew and I taught ourselves Netrunner by reading through the rulebook and it was tough. Fortunately we were at Dicetower East and there were plenty of folks who stopped by to ask if we needed help (so many people excited to see Netrunner lol).
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.
We bought Netrunner because it looked amazing, but we laboured through as many of the rules as we could stomach before putting it away without playing. That was 10 years ago. We've haven't had the energy to try again yet.
Piggybacking off what JamesSwift said, Netrunner seems like a game where you try to understand the rules, pause (or give up), go to an in-person meetup, get 'tutored' to really learn, then wait again for however long and try again to learn the rules. In my case it will probably be about 80% in-person learning and 20% on my own studying the rules at home.
I liked how in Exploding Kittens (card game not a board game but similar genre) they basically say - watch this YT video URL + QR code to understand how to actually play.
I definitely can't absorb the meaning of two pages of turn-order and action-economy description faster than a one-minute demo of someone taking a turn can convey the same information. I can read it that fast, maybe, but it'll take some more reading and maybe some scratch paper to sort it out, or even busting out the game and stepping through it with the pieces as if I were playing. That's all way slower than a video.
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 like Phil Eklund’s approach for High Frontier. The manual includes example games with every event and move explained, and the game has a solitaire mode that lets you play by yourself. There are small differences in some of the rules, and scoring is different, but the core gameplay is the same. Once you've beaten the solitaire mode you will certainly understand the rules quite well.
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.
> if you're trying to decide whether to get a game, do you read the rule book?
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.
They do have a manual, but getting the gist of the game through watching actual gameplay is a lot more intuitive for most people. It's like a 5m video.
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.
I kind of like Root's approach, just make three separate rulebooks. One quickstart guide, one "normal" rulebook, and one "law" type rulebook laying out everything in almost procedural style with clear and consistent definitions etc. Many games could benefit from that.
The Fate books (at least several of them) are also free to download, with some Creative Commons license or similar, so you can read the rules without having to buy anything if you do not want to.
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.
One war-game I played came with two rule books, which was incredibly helpful for learning to play - each player could read his own copy.
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.
If you have fun isn't that the point. Ideally games should be a here are the simplified rules so you can have fun fast. Then here are the full rules so you can play a much more complex and fun game. Of course pulling that off is hard.
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%.
This is addressed in TFA. In many cases, attempts to create a simplified version of a game just teach bad habits; strategies that work in the simplified game might be not just suboptimal when the full set of options is available, but actively counterproductive.
But I dare say many fans of "heavier" games - especially ones with more of a simulationist bent - would disagree that having fun is sufficient.
Agricola is pretty old. Many of the older euros that were translated to English are shocking. And the way information is conveyed is noticeably worse than a good modern euro.
The original Agricola rulebook is almost completely unusable and the only way to learn how to play back in the day was someone who already knew how to play teaching you - I presume in an unbroken oral tradition all the way back to Uwe Rosenberg.
In a typical wargame special case rules are numerous, but mostly expected and conforming to familiar design patterns (e.g. entering a map hexagon containing something special with a unit, depending on unit type and state, is going to cost some extra point of movement or end the move completely).
So they and can be looked up when needed (e.g. what units can move enough to cross this river this turn?) and promptly forgotten.
It is usually enough to study wargame rulebooks just enough to know general procedures and trust the simulation to be unsurprisingly realistic.
I have not encountered a wargame that shipped with two rulebooks in the box, but often the latest rulebook PDF is available as a free download, so when playing a large wargame we often have printed one copy for each player, or at least almost that many. It is always good to have a rulebook within reach.
It was rare, but appreciated. The full-color bound rulebook was almost always better than a PDF printout (though rarely the PDF would be a newer version).
> I need a how-to right now and all I get is an explanation.
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.
Did you not read the link? The reference should be obvious. I'm giving the link too much credit calling it 'explanation' but it isn't even an example of what it advocates in any case.
I'm a little less than impressed by the presentation here. The idea that Divio is describing here is the Diataxis framework (https://diataxis.fr/), which "is the work of" (https://diataxis.fr/colophon/) Daniele Procida (https://vurt.eu/). Who, incidentally, is also giving the PyCon talk in the video on the page you linked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vKPhjcMZg). But I don't see anything resembling attribution for the ideas. They aren't just common industry knowledge or "received wisdom". (And the "quote" from David Laing at the top isn't really accomplishing anything, either.)
Thanks. I already had "something about Diataxis" somewhere on my blog agenda before the HN post, and between this and the rest of the comments and the article I feel like I have a lot more material now.
I’m not that impressed with Diataxis, considering it is basically describing the approach of Django project’s docs—which (both docs and the aporoach) predate Diataxis by many years—without giving any credit that I know of.
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.
I don't think this is quite the same idea, and it isn't anywhere near as deeply elaborated, nor given a theoretical basis. Of course no concept on this scale just pops out of the ether fully formed - as I noted elsewhere, the dichotomy (tetrachotomy?) described by the Diataxis model bears a striking similarity to that in Kalb's model of experimental learning. But that's just it - Diataxis could claim that much more strongly as an ancestor than Kaplan-Moss' approach, which is simply proposing that multiple forms of documentation exist and should co-exist to complement each other, without proposing why or how.
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.
It drives me crazy personally, I think Arcs abandoned this for good reason. Root has a major rules sprawl issue IMO. Many rules are spread throughout the cards, the "Learning to Play" guide, the "Law of Root", the player mats, etc. I don't actually think you can really learn the game unless you have the board and player mats right in front of you. Wehrle's predilection for thematic names with clearer/plainer synonyms I think makes this hard as well.
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).
> Root has a major rules sprawl issue IMO. Many rules are spread throughout the cards, the "Learning to Play" guide, the "Law of Root", the player mats, etc.
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.
Most modern boardgames do something like that (although typically in a single book with multiple sections).
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.
> Most modern boardgames do something like that (although typically in a single book with multiple sections).
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).
> Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to
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.
Funny that you mention Root. I recently played this game for the first time with three other SWE friends (also their first times), and we all found the multiple sources of truth, each seeming to make the assumption that you have already read the others and occasionally referring you to them, thoroughly baffling -- to the point where we started to make joking comparisons to the kind of software documentation that has an Overview, a Quick Start, a Tutorial, an Introduction, a Beginner's Guide, a How To page, a User's Guide, a Getting Started page, a Specification, a Reference Manual... Looking at you, Maven plugins.
Then again, maybe it was just that we were all a teensy bit drunk.
I'm afraid I can't. In very general terms, I just remember the feeling that I got several times was similar to that of discovering that something that I had thought was a scalar quantity was in fact a vector. Un-thought-of dimensions just seemed to keep popping up.
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.
Non-games could also benefit from different books for different use cases.
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.
I recall my favorite part of opening up a new Nintendo game was poring over the manual. I didn't actually want it for instructions. It was the lore and the pictures and the dreams of what I could do with the game that made it fun.
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.
That mechanic is so creative. I love the gave but it's hard to describe what's so great about it to others without also revealing that brilliant mechanic which is really fun to encounter for the first time without expecting it.
A conversation vaguely pointing toward a key game mechanic that might have something to do with metatextuality but which mustn't be described for fear of spoiling it is a damn good way to get me to buy a game.
(Just purchased. Easy buy vs. wishlist decision since it's currently half-off on Steam)
We've "lost something in society" because we don't want to be immersed in lore and pictures and dreams of what we could do while our friends sit patiently around the table waiting for us to look up if we can build a dairy barn in the farm flash step?
This is referencing a rule. I'm not sure I'm arguing against a clear reference, I like those. But I've certainly been at a table where we open the box, the host hasn't read the rules and frankly doesn't want to. I would hope you'd be excited about the board game, enjoy the book that comes with it, and then invite your friends over to play :-)
I've been that friend who was invited over to play with hosts that were really good and knew all the obscure rules. Not very fun when you discover your strategy fails because of some rule you didn't know of that they waited until you were committed to point it out.
Realistically with anything more than the most basic of games I feel as if it's reasonable to expect that the first 1-2 games are just practice because as you say, there will definitely be something that you've missed.
> Not very fun when you discover your strategy fails because of some rule you didn't know of that they waited until you were committed to point it out.
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.
I think you may be romanticizing the past a bit here. I got a Nintendo when it came out too and I never did any of the things you've done. You may have just imagined everyone was behaving in the same way you were, when it's probably just as likely they behaved more like me.
I concede this may be true. First time I played D&D, I bought the rulebook and pored over it until I knew the rules and details -- and had a blast. Now, being a DM, no one reads the rules.
It's not the same. Instruction manuals were unambiguous. (SimLife's was really fun from what I remember.) You got one and it said everything it needed to.
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.
In both religion and TTRPGs every once in a while someone says lets throw away all those supplements and get back to the original. Some of them then add supplements (either their own new ones, or the old ones) back as they realize something they want to change/clarify.
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.
I remember getting Ultima V as a kid and it came with this beautiful cloth map, some little game related physical artifacts, and a big lore book you could read to get the backstory and context. I read that thing cover to cover before embarking on that awesome game. It was really something special. They don’t make games like that anymore. Now it’s “Here, have a half-assed binary, delivered online, full of bugs (because we rushed it out without QA) that’s going to need a zero day patch just to work, and search the web if you want (fan-written) lore and immersion.”
Agreed. We're not romanticizing the past, it's now a business model that the first version of a boardgame is early-beta-qiality as a market exploration tactic, to see whether and how much $ should invest in fixing it.
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".
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?)
What era were you doing this in? I love looking at these old manuals but every era was different.
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.
Not OP, but I had a similar experience growing up in the '90s. StarCraft in '98 is probably the best example; the original manual is the only source with the backstory explaining how the humans in the game left earth in giant colony ships, got lost, and ended up colonizing the koprulu sector. Without that backstory, the game's story - and especially Brood War's story - are pretty hard to follow.
> 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.
> 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.
Manuals served another purpose in the 1980s: pirates rarely copied the manual with the game and so someone who bought the real game could learn how to play it while the pirates had a large collection of games that were no fun because without the manual they spent a lot of time trying different buttons just to see what worked - often they never did figure out the secret moves and so the game wasn't even winnable even though they could make progress and it seemed like they just needed to get better.
I loved being able to rent a game for weekend from our grocery store’s vhs department. I’d spend the rest of the trip home eagerly reading the guide while my mom shopped and I’d be so hyped to play the game by the time we got home.
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
The rulebooks are the worst part of the hobby. Some are beyond awful. One Deck Dungeon took me several attempts and a few google searches to figure out.
Another bad one was the travel version of Azul, which assumes you have already played the full size version.
I also watched a few videos to understand one deck dungeon, but it wasn't until I bought the mobile game that I really felt like I knew what was intended.
As an avid board gamer, I think one of the biggest factors is page count. A big rule book makes the game feel less approachable. In the example provided at the bottom, the rewritten rulebook is ~50 pages. The original is 24. It doesn't matter how well it's written if it scares people off.
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)
I re-write rules for myself for games where I need a better teaching "script". For example, the Keyper rulebook was terrible, but the rules themselves were not. I wrote myself a summary so I could re-teach the game if needed.
Yes! Anything I'm serious about learning, I (re)write the documentation as I go. Haven't tried this with board games yet, but it actually sounds kind of fun.
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 mostly agree, but it depends on "density". If there's lots of photos and diagrams that both makes the page count larger, and helps ease it. You can have a super dense text only book that's 24 pages, but hard to parse because there's no images/diagrams, etc... Layout also matters, as does spacing.
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
I personally dislike how-to-play videos. If you blink and miss something, hunting around a video is much worse than scanning a rulebook. I also do not have the patience to sit there for 10-15 minutes.
> If you blink and miss something, hunting around a video is much worse than scanning a rulebook.
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.
I really like a 5 minute how-to-play before either reading the rules, or having them explained to me. It gives me all the context and makes the other information sit much better.
You are on the mark. The thing most people hate is learning a new game. My friend's wife refuses to learn new games but is fine playing Terraforming Mars every night (which is not an intro level game). Take games like Ark Nova with an hour teach (literally) and you really really have to want to learn and play that game. It is also why party games and simple card games stay so popular because the rules are always less than 5 minutes.
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.
Large complex games can be fun. But they require investment, if you don't have a group who will play the game with you "often" then they are not worth learning. Meanwhile I can teach someone a card game in a couple minutes, play for some time over a meal and never see that person again.
>It is also why party games and simple card games stay so popular because the rules are always less than 5 minutes.
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.).
Spiel des Jahres quality games always have great rulebooks. Dominion, for all its complexity, has a very simple rulebook, and even all the corner cases you can run into with the countless expansion cards, have pretty neat "from the basic principles of the game" resolutions, usually obvious in retrospect. It is a very clean, rigorous design.
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.
I would say (largely) even good designers don't write great rulebooks. It is a total different skill set. The best analogy is that Publishers are to Rulebooks what Software Releases are to QA. It is always left to the end and rushed out the door. There is an assumption that between social media and BGG and How to Play videos that people will figure it out.
Well, there's two steps. To write a good rulebook, you need good rules first. You need to really think about it like a programmer, in terms of procedures, invariants, completeness etc. So that when you, when you play your own game, you don't constantly run into rules questions that you have to stop and settle. If you do have clear and consistent rules in your head for your own game, then writing a good manual is just craftmansship, that you can even get in a professional technical writer to do for you.
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.
As it happens, I was taught Dominion by other players, but really learned it from online play and other such resources. It's the sort of game with depth that exceeds most players' patience - extremely replayable, but only if you don't really care about the fact that the theming is paper-thin (literally, in a sense) and happen to get captivated by the core mechanics (and the variety offered by the expansions).
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.)
My opinion, maybe unpopular, is that if you really want to feel like you're managing a medieval kingdom (or whatever) then computer games are just better anyway. For anything that gets the slightest bit like a simulation, you want to let the computer do the bookkeeping.
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.
I loved playing games I was familiar with because the rules had been finalised with the people I played with, and we had agreed on the ambiguities (they became house rules). We then developed our strategies based on a known and "complete" understanding of the rules, and the fun came from winning based on the mutually understood set of rules, not a strategem that a player extracted from an unread part of the manual. On the other hand, learning a new game is fun when no-one has played it before, and part of the process was agreeing on the rules after a few run-throughs. Illuminati was great like that. Yet so was the Game of Life card game.
A complicated game/rulebook is a different beast. I believe it also needs a person willing to teach the game, or learn it on their own, then teach it. It needs a person familiar with the game, and new players willing to invest in the
game knowing they will play it together A LOT. That will exists.
> 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...
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.
>A big rule book makes the game feel less approachable. In the example provided at the bottom, the rewritten rulebook is ~50 pages. The original is 24. It doesn't matter how well it's written if it scares people off.
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.
I agree it's intimidating. I think the way to counter that is good player aids. If you have a really well designed reference in front of each player, then the teach is often "see that second line, well this is how that works". Also the teacher should read the rules ahead of time, so they can can summarize or go in more details depending on the comprehension of players.
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.
For medium/heavy-complexity games, it's essential to have a glossary (preferably with pictures), either/both at the start/end of the rulebook or the complete reference. And the glossary should have (clickable) section/page references for where to read more about a concept (and the glossary should be complete (but not nitpicking or pedantic), which sounds self-evident yet is not the case a shocking amount of the time). And the glossary should also be referenced by/ have consistent terminology with the quickstart/reference card.
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...]
It's so classic that board game adaptations of computer games are bookkeeping extravaganzas. I don't understand why people want to "replicate the computer game experience" in a board game, why not just play the computer game then? There are so many games that play to board games' strengths, instead of trying to be cut down computer games.
Sid Meier's Civilization is pretty much the poster child for an outstanding online game that cannot be converted to a (physical) boardgame without either super-heavy mechanics and bookkeeping, or huge simplifications and compromises that take all the interesting nuances away.
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 that many people are so afraid of reading game rules that they'd rather watch 15-30m how to play videos.
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 don’t know much about Paul Grogan but I know he was specifically brought on for the ISS Vanguard rule book and, man, what a piece of fucking trash that thing is. The book dedicates a considerable amount of pages running you through a walkthrough game. Every time I open it I’m reminded that a large portion of the rule book is, in fact, not rules.
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.
I think board games on the more complex end are running into the fact that they're goddamn near impossible to teach, or to learn well enough to teach, without watching a demonstration or playing a couple demo rounds. A book alone is simply not sufficient without, as the linked PDF complains about, something like the effort of studying a textbook, probably with the game-pieces right alongside and working through fake play as you go so that any of it makes sense.
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.
That's not likely to be a problem since these days every board game has a number of instructional videos (and that's in addition to video reviews, which typically show how a game works, though not in as much detail).
Which is why many say there needs to be several rule books. You need the quick start summary page. You need the detailed reference book. You need the walk through example game. You probably should have the simplified rules for a quick game (with some limits so that the missing full rules are not needed).
> The book dedicates a considerable amount of pages running you through a walkthrough game. Every time I open it I’m reminded that a large portion of the rule book is, in fact, not rules.
What's wrong with that? Genuinely asking. It sounds useful to people trying to learn, and easy to skip if you've already learned.
The rules on how to play begin on something like page 29 if memory serves. Personally I find that ridiculous. I believe the glossary also recommends to you pages that cover the concepts in both halves of the book, but the rules in the first half of the book are not written as rules… sometimes. Sometimes they are written like rules, and they’re mostly the full rules but it’s not the rules section of the book.
When I’m reading through a rulebook I want to browse headers to find the concept I want, and then read the text.
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.
This is awesome! I don't know your goals with this, but maybe opening the rule markdown files through GitHub to crowd source info would allow you to reduce the hard work of writing the rules.
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.
Already done. There’s a link on the homepage to the GitHub, and you can just add a new markdown file in the rules folder. It auto deploys on merge to master.
I've only read like 20 pages but this is already hitting the nail on the head for me. I've tried many times to play specific games with friends on Tabletop Simulator, but more often than not we bounce off because it's too tedious to read rulebooks.
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...
I've wanted a standard rulebook format for ages. I should be able to intuitively flip to the win conditions page because it's always in the same place, for example.
You shouldn't have to "flip to" the win conditions. Historically they were among the first thing written in the rules (I was that weird kid who had actually read the rules for Monopoly, and could tell you that your "free parking" setup was BS, and explain how mortgaging is supposed to work...): in a section titled "Object of the Game" (sometimes in all caps).
I think there's an understated component here that many games are built off of your knowledge of other games, so at one point the rulebook is there explaining stuff but omits a lot.
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.
I think at some point you have to conclude that people want to be confused. That part of the pleasure is trying to internalize a bunch of disjointed nonsense until eventually something clicks
I sponsored Nemesis on Kickstarter. A very good game. But the rules are horribly written. 5 years later I still discover new rules. I didn't even played the extensions I bought because it turns out 35+ years old adults don't have much time.
I think a lot of the problems with game _rulebooks_ are actually problems with the game _design_.
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.
I completely agree. I've seen many games with good rulebooks, but they're not the sprawling complicated dungeon crawlers like so many examples from the essay. Those big games are going to have complicated rulebooks because they have complicated rules, and there's no way around that without changing the games themselves.
Yep. And it has to do with how complex the rulesets are, not just how many rules there are. If there are dozens of rules that could apply at any moment, that's much harder to deal with (and learn and teach) than sub-rulesets that are compartmentalised (like when in battle, use all the following rules).
Very interesting and informative read. It's kind of wild that nobody other than this author seems to be approaching this topic from this sort of technical perspective. In fact, it's kind of blowing my mind a bit that the game design program at the school I attended never had any sort of technical writing course at all, despite emphasizing rulebook ease-of-understanding and so forth when grading our board game projects. In hindsight, this is quite the obvious oversight!
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.
One of the biggest issues I have is that a good rulebook/teacher should start at the "What are we trying to do?" From there everything else should flow.
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.
> One of the biggest issues I have is that a good rulebook/teacher should start at the "What are we trying to do?"
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.
> "What are we trying to do?" From there everything else should flow.
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.
That works great, except for that genre of board games in which everyone is playing by a different set of rules: "Player 1, you're the cat, and you're trying to get mice and avoid water. Player 2, you're the fish; you're trying to get water and avoid cats.. Player 3, you're the dog, and you're trying to get cats and avoid newspapers, etc...."
Both Pathfinder 2e and the Lancer TTRPG rulebooks are basically software implementation guides.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread1: https://upload.snakesandlattes.com/rules/f/FarmingGameThe.pd...
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gmtwebsiteassets/living_r... [ 5MB PDF ]
(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.
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.
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.
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
Good idea
I bought two of the Fate books (first the "toolkit" book, then the "core system" book) not fully understanding the differences.
https://ledergames.com/pages/resources
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.
[0] https://jacobian.org/2009/nov/10/what-to-write/
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.
[1]: https://www.onepagerules.com/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, some people love to figure out complex rules, and that can be a part of the game experience.
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.
https://boardgametextbook.com/EBGRIA.pdf
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.
(and if you actually follow the rules the game ends in a reasonable amount of time)
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.
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.