5 ms·

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

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)

adamredwoods 2y ago
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. https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules-teach https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules... https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/212516/keyper 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-made-for-myself https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2979178/some-rules-notes-i-...
- 12_throw_away 2y ago
  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.
imzadi 2y ago
My group recently played Veiled Fate. Loved the game, but the 40-page rulebook was certainly intimidating.
wormius 2y ago
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
legitster 2y ago
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.
- sgbeal 2y ago
  > 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.
- stevage 2y ago
  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.
snarf21 2y ago
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.
- bluGill 2y ago
  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.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >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.).
pimlottc 2y ago
> 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.
zahlman 2y ago
>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. Surely there's some compromise to be made here.
grayfaced 2y ago
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.
smcin 2y ago
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-civilization-the-board-game 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-new-dawn https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233247/civilization-a-ne...]
- vintermann 2y ago
  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.
globular-toast 2y ago
> 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.

adamredwoods 2y ago

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. https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules-teach https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules... https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/212516/keyper 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-made-for-myself https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2979178/some-rules-notes-i-...

12_throw_away 2y ago
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.

imzadi 2y ago

My group recently played Veiled Fate. Loved the game, but the 40-page rulebook was certainly intimidating.

wormius 2y ago

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

legitster 2y ago

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.

sgbeal 2y ago
> 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.
stevage 2y ago
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.

snarf21 2y ago

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.

bluGill 2y ago
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.
zahlman 2y ago
>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.).

pimlottc 2y ago

> 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.

zahlman 2y ago

>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. Surely there's some compromise to be made here.

grayfaced 2y ago

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.

smcin 2y ago

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-civilization-the-board-game 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-new-dawn https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233247/civilization-a-ne...]

vintermann 2y ago
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.

globular-toast 2y ago

> 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.