Rule the Game: Secrets to Writing Clear, Concise, and Compelling Board Game Rulebooks

hi I'm Adam Porter and this is my board gaming vlog and once again I'm going to try and answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers about board game design and this time it's a question from a viewer called Brian who was asking about how to clearly communicate your rules to other players so I thought I would start off by talking about how I personally learn to play a game so I would take a rule book I've recently been learning the game oceans which is a follow up to my favourite game of all time evolution and so I've been troubled at it from the rule book so the first thing I do is I'd read through the rule book but then after I've done that I usually I've forgotten a few other things that I read in the early pages or maybe I misunderstood certain things so I always then go and look for a video and you can pretty much find a video for any published board game you know a month or two after it's initially released it's a bit more tricky when you first get home from those trade fairs and conventions where you've got a game that's not found its way up to reviewers yet but with oceans there is a video from watch it played from Rodney Smith and they're always wonderful Rodney Smith is is just a fantastic games teacher and the detail is all there so I can check have I misunderstood anything and it will remind me of things that I may have forgotten then I go on to while I'm reading the rulebook I should say I've got the pieces out in front of me and I'm moving the pieces around so I'm getting a feel for what the components are as I go through step by step through the rules trying to sort of mock my way through a turn or two of the game once I've watched the video to sort of consolidate that learning I then go on to BoardGameGeek and I skim through the rules for him I don't read every rules query that's there but I do like to look out for little questions that that might come up in the game you know a question will be mentioned there and I think actually I can imagine my friends asking a question like that so that's how I kind of consolidate that learning so then moving on from how I learn a game I thought I would talk about how I teach again so if I'm gonna teach a player how to play something like oceans and I would start by describing the theme that's the the initial thing and I don't spend too long with the theme personally I'm not a hugely I mean I love the theme of oceans I love the theme of the evolution games but you know first and foremost that that's that it's pretty clear you know you and you look at the pictures you can see what it's all about and most of the euro-style games on my shelves they come down to you know shorthand in in my little gaming group as I'll say blah blah blah victory points because essentially that's what they boil down to is that you know it doesn't really matter where we are or what we're doing we're building a castle or something to try and get victory points but I want to lay out basically what the theme is second thing I want to do before we get into the detail as I want the players to know how to win so I want to tell them right this is what you're aiming for these are your main strategies your main ways of getting there okay very very briefly you can do this you can do this you can do this you can do this okay that's how you win you get victory points okay I want to give them an overview how long it's going to take what sort of similar games they might have played so with oceans I'd say it's a bit like playing evolution similar length of game similar sort of game style you know it can be potentially a little bit mean it's quite direct interaction taking stuff of other players I want them to know that upfront before we go into the game so so they've got the right mindset to get in there then we get onto the detail of the gameplay and again as I said well I'm learning the game myself I'll have the pieces out in front of me I'm moving the pieces around as I demonstrate what you can do in the game and so you can get that sort of tactile element to the teaching as well I use a lot of shorthand when I'm teaching games I like the people I'll play with will usually not always but usually be quite experienced game players so I can get away with saying things like well it's a seven wonders style draft or you know so sushi go sushi go draft and people know instantly what I mean and that saves me several minutes of explaining the rules I play a lot of trick taking games I don't need to explain all the rules because all the players around my table are likely to know what trick-taking means and then once I've gone through the detail then I asked for any question and I deal with any questions that have come up and often I find I have to repeat things I've already explained but I don't mind that's that's the whole purpose of it and that's the similar to me consolidating my learning by going looking at video my friends they're consolidating what they've heard by asking me and double-checking and reminding themselves of things they may have forgotten already so that's how I teach again now the problem with rule books if we're trying to communicate our rules perhaps a prototype game perhaps a published game the problem with rule books is that they can't do a lot of these things they can't reference similar games you can't say oh this game is a bit like this other game you can't use shorthand you can't call it a seven Wonders draft a sushi go draft you shouldn't really assume that people understand what trick taking is for example you can't move pieces around you've just got a book a lot of text a lot of words maybe some pictures you can't answer any questions you can have an FAQ at the back but you're guessing what questions you're gonna be asked and that's where the BoardGameGeek forum comes in and is really really helpful so videos go a long way towards sort of kind of addressing the issue of moving the pieces around because you can see stuff in motion and the BoardGameGeek forum goes away towards you know giving people the opportunity to ask questions but it's not immediate and it's not you know immediately sort of engaging on either so we have a problem with robots and you've got to make them clear whose job is it is it our job as the designer or is it the job of the publisher to do it and and to be honest I think it's it's ultimately going to be the job of the publisher to put together a decent rule book for the finished product you know we're game designers we come up with the rules we don't have to be experts in writing we don't have to be experts in communication that's a useful skill for all sorts of reasons but it's by no means a requirement if you've got a brilliant game idea to also be a brilliant writer or a brilliant communicator however if your rules are badly written then you may miss out on getting that game published and that's because your publisher is likely to give it one chance they're gonna sit down with that rule book they're gonna try and learn the game they fail to learn it from the rules are they even going to bother to come and ask you the question probably not maybe they only have a a testing session once a month maybe you know that they're not going to immediately get on the phone to you to try and solve those problems what will happen is your game will go back on the shelf and another thing or maybe I'll have a look at it again next month and then when next month comes they'll look at it on the Shelby thing or that one was a pain to learn and they won't bother and at no point have they contacted you to try and clarify those questions because they've got loads of games to look at where other people have made their rules clear so in order to get through all that competition you need to make your rules approachable the other thing is that publishers are often learning the rules in the second language you've written your rules in English maybe I guess English is probably the most sensible language to write your rules in because then you can show it to publishers all around the world because it's it's the the most widely spoken language but that means that often people are learning it in their second language which makes it harder to learn the rules and I personally you know I have quite I feel like my English vocabulary is quite good and I use quite long words sometimes and probably quite complex sentence constructions for somebody who is not a native English speaker to understand so try to simplify that language for the rule book is really really useful it's not just the publisher you've got to worry about the publisher has teams of play testers that they then give the game to to get it tested and those people have got to understand the rules as well and if they have a bad experience learning from the rules that's gonna impact on their their view of the game overall in the game experience and and you're they're going to give negative reports back to that publisher when they're still working out do they want to take your game on board or not at the point where the game is going into production then it does become a publisher and responsibility to make the rule book as good as it can be and I've had different experiences with different publishers I have five games on the market at the moment I've had a couple of games which have gone through development processes and eventually not to come to market and I've got another five games that are signed so I've been through this process with a lot of published over the last few years and I find that there is no uniform approach between different publishers you might have no involvement as the designer in the final written rules they might just be shown to you at the end and say these are the rules that's the first you see of it okay so that's possible no involvement at all the second thing that can happen is you can be involved when it's too late so I've had the situation where I've been presented with a rulebook for for comment you know could you comment on the rules II happy with the way they've been written but it's already been translated into eight or ten languages at which point any comments that I make are gonna have to then be translated into another 8 or 10 languages and there's no way for me to check whether that translation has happened or not so I'm very limited in terms of what I can change and what I can manipulate I've had the experience having total responsibility for the rules where where everything is going to be written exactly as I've written it now that's quite terrifying as a prospect cuz I'm no professional Rules writer and so for me to have to lay it out and take full responsibility for that rule book that that worries me a little bit because my my instinct is to be thorough to get every little eventualities in there to make sure that there are no rules questions left at all but in doing so I can make that rule book quite daunting for the players the best relationship is where you have involvement at every stage where the publisher comes to you every time they've got a rules question they show you every draft they allow you plenty of time I mean that's another thing is often the rulebook will a draft will come to you now say we need your response by the later this afternoon because then it's going to the printer and you're already in you know you're doing your day job you can't suddenly take you know two or three hours off in an afternoon to to look through a rule book for one of my games to get it there in time for the publisher to get it to the printer so you want involved at every single stage with plenty of time to go through it to discuss to send notes back and forth on a good relationship with the publisher where everyone's responding to each other promptly but respectful of each other's time as well of course we all know that sometimes publishers do a terrible job with Rule books we've all seen it even with fantastic publishers I've seen some terrible rule books the same publisher will have another game with an amazing rulebook Computers thing what happened there how did how did that one get missed and I think the problem is that publishers have so many things going on and different timelines and things get delayed in production and things get shifted around and sometimes the rulebook is a bit of an afterthought it's the final thing in the process they've run out of time they throw it together they don't have time to do blind testing on it and so as a result it comes out and and it comes out flawed and in worst cases I have bought games where they have been unplayable from the rules you know I've had to go online and search and search to try and find solutions to try and work out how is this supposed to work and then it turns out this just actually an entire passage that has been removed from the rulebook and you couldn't learn the rules just from just from reading the rulebook there so some publishers do a terrible job some publishers of course do a wonderful job and it's very hard to work out you know which which you're getting when you buy a game and I think sometimes it's hard for the publisher because they're so close to the product to actually work out whether their rulebook is functioning well or not and that's the purpose of the blind testing so how soon should you write the rules well when you're designing a game I would say write your rules as soon as possible I might write my rules before I even play test the game with any other players it might be the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and I'm laying in bed and I've got a rough idea going around in my head maybe just to get those down up those rules down on paper just so I remember the idea now might be the very first thing I do and then every play test I'll be adjusting those rules and improving those rules and the clarity of the rules and the consistency of the rules as I go along and keeping them organized for a series of numbered documents on my computer so I can always look back at how the game has evolved and we talked previously in my video about how to play test and we talked about how to log your play tests and how to sort of write reports in a journal and so on so that's really useful for keeping a record of which rules version you're at okay going back to suppose of rules writing what sort of stuff do you want to consider when you're writing the rules this is going to be a little bit I suppose a little bit it might sound a little bit academic but I think it's important you want to avoid the passive voice what I mean by that is it's clunky and difficult to understand when you have sentences like the dice are rolled by the player you're better off using the active voice which is where you say the player rolls the dice okay it's less wordy it puts the player right at the center of the action so it's a logical sequence and the player immediately feels involved and it makes your your rules so much easier to read I would go one step further personally and this is a personal preference as all of this is this is all subjective you know what makes good rules I like the second person structure so that is where I say other players turn up I wouldn't say on the player stand I would say on your turn you roll the dice okay you not a player okay I want I want to put you right into the action and I want to make it conversational as if I was teaching you the game I don't want this to be a difficult sort of imposing sort of structured manual for you to fight your way through no it's like we're having a chat you on your turn you roll the dice this is also useful because it avoids the issue of gendered pronouns which is a big issue in in writing rule books very frequently you see rule books which only refer to heat on a player's turn he does this this this and this okay and and they never mentioned there might be a she playing the game or somebody who who is gender-neutral playing the game okay and regardless of your views about political correctness or or whatever we don't want to alienate anybody from learning our rules feeling like they're like they're welcome at the table feeling like this is a game for them so we ought to be writing I mean even he she he /c is is is a bit clunky it's it's it's it's still making assumptions there and so I think the the singular they in English and so on a players term they do this is is actually probably the best solution I know some people don't like the singular they they find it difficult and awkward and and inelegant and things like this I don't really have those issues with it it can be a little unclear at times who exactly it's referring to and so I like to use examples where I give the players names so at rather than using player 1 player 2 player 3 I might say Emma Ben and John or or whatever and I'll try and go you know 50/50 on traditionally male or female names or I might try and use some gender-neutral names in there and I I like to use that actually to sort of honor some of my key play testers you know if they get into an example with their name in there then I think that's that's just a nice sort of way of honoring that player I I think you need to think about consistency in the way that you write the rules I have a tendency when I'm writing my rules to put capital letters all over the place for no reason at all well I think there's an important component in the game I'll give it a capital letter at the start of the word and then later stage is where I'm really cleaning up that rule because when age is trying to find these capital letters remove them work out why they were there in the first place you don't need them they don't need to be in there it just makes it harder to read if you want to really you know make really sort of emphasize a particular word put it in bold or you use italics but do this sparingly because again it becomes very difficult if everything is involved throughout your rulebook again with consistency think about your terminology so when you're referring to something I use in the same name for it every time or I using a whole load of different names for what is essentially the same thing is it a pile of cards is it a deck of cards that there are so many examples that's the that comes off the top of my head in my game pick cocoa we had a big issue or I had a big issue I don't know how the publishers got on but I had a big issue we're trying to work out what terminology I should be using in pick cocoa you have a hand of cards in front of you that you can't see and on your turn you play a card which is sat in the hand of cards in front of the player to your left and so I prefer to use the term that the hand of cards that sat in front of me that I can't see is my hand of cards okay some players after publication of the game we're saying well that's not really your hand of cards your hand of cards is the one in front of the player to the left because that's the one you select cards from but my thing is I'm much more attached to their cards that are in front of me they're the ones that are important to me they're the ones that are different to all the I can see all of all of the other cards I can see all of them but these ones in front of me are special to me because I can't see them and also the original sort of thought of the game was what would happen if you had a trick-taking game where you can't see your own cards and I find it hard to shake that viewpoints about the game so although I completely see the point that the cards to the left of me are my hand the rulebook would say the cards in front of you are your hand and it's important that we're consistent throughout the rulebook about exactly what we're talking about everything else is just semantics and terminology so you've got to think about that stuff are you confusing people by using two different terms for the same thing or calling two different things the same term that's that's the opposite isn't it equally confusing the other thing that comes up a lot in rule books is anon cards is the use of thematic terms for familiar components so this is where well let's take a look at the game oceans and how it works here now I wanted to look at oceans partly because it's a rule book that I've read recently and and you know it's the newest game that I have in front of me but also because I think it walks a very fine line between getting its theme across and using unfamiliar terminology so for example in oceans this box here is called the reef whereas this box here is called the ocean and the these these little tokens in here are called population tokens and this is where I think we get close to the line because although these are called population tokens they they come in various different colors and things which is it's just to make it sort of look nice really but at least I should say these are wooden pieces that I got from people source these aren't with the original game but the original game has cardboard equivalents and the different colors they make no difference this is just a population token the same as this is a population token and of course when players play the game they're likely to call these fish because that's what they are you know so but the cards refer to population and so there's a leap there there's there's one extra step to teaching the game because I have to explain to a player that when it cards his population it means one of these cards when it needs one of these tokens when a card says the reef it means this when a card says the ocean it means this now it's actually important that these are called population and not called fish because each one of them does not represent a single fish when this is put onto my species board this does not mean that I have multiple different fish in my sort of supply here what this means is that my species has a population of four okay and that's a sort of that doesn't mean it's got four creatures in it that's just a sort of numerical value to show compact comparative to the other species around the table how much it's got these could be brown cubes as they were in in evolution but but the fact that they're that they're these nice fish just add to the theme and the richness and the atmosphere of the whole thing it would be a terribly drab looking game if these weren't little fish tokens and I actually think this game walks that just on the right side of that just about gets it right just about gets away with it where some other games have fallen foul of this I remember trying to learn the game Android netrunner a few years ago and and just being totally baffled by the jargon in the game every single action had a new name which was unfamiliar and difficult I think one of the really difficult things in writing rule books is trying to eliminate all assumptions from your rule book that's what you're assuming that the players are going to understand what you're talking about when they really don't and so for example I think in the first car the first copies of pick cocoa that came out I have the feeling reading through the rules that the rules kind of assumed that players would know what taking a trick means and of course a lot players do but an awful lot of players don't and I suspect they would be confused by that rule book and that was fixed in later sort of editions of the game where the rules would explain a little bit more clearly as if nobody is if you'd never played a trick-taking game I mean I've got some examples here so this is the game frustration which is basically Ludo isn't it with a Papa mattock in the middle and the rules on the back of the box so so we have on the back of the box here we've got the rules written as in so many sort of children's games there's no other rulebook slam your paddle to shake the dice if you roll the six move one of your men onto your start space note whenever you get a six round again if you don't roll the six try again on your next turn if you have men on the track and you get a six you can either put a new man on your start space move a man that's already out if you get a six new start space is occupied and so on so they keep on going on about rolling a six that goes on about if your possible move is to land on one of your own men stay where you are when the man has moved all the way around the track get him home and so on at no point in this rules does it say that when you roll that dice you move as many spaces as it shows on the dice okay it just assumes that you're going to understand that this works like every other roll and move game out there and I mean it's not difficult to make that that leap but as a basic sort of principle it should say there you roll the dice and you move as many spaces as it shows on the dice but it's completely neglected from the game and this is a game that is sold millions of copies you know this is not a first edition this has been around for so many years in mass quantities and yet the rules are still badly written we're so just I was just surprised when I came across that I've always found it am you know one line people people often find it amusing and they talk about the fact that rules always write and take their player take their game board and place it in the center of the table why do they need to tell us that as if we would do anything up what else are we gonna do with it of course we're gonna place it in the center of the table but but that's by no means certain is it there's plenty of games have lots of player but lots of boards individual player boards where do they go where are they all position so maybe it does need explaining this one is a game called nabbit which is not a mass-market game a sort of tile laying scrabble Bananagrams style game and it says here in the rules for the set up remove the letter tiles from the plastic bags discard or recycle the waste so now it's telling us that we've got to get the components out of their package and throw away any waste I mean it may as well say on there take the cellophane off the game box so I mean it's just bizarre that somebody feels it's necessary to put that into the rules and then you've got other games where they leave out actual vital gameplay content you know and and I mean you've got somewhere in the middle surely I found with my game thrown actually the very first plate blind play test that I did have thrown was an interesting one because it's Rome there are every round there are four cards that are laid out in the center of the table and these determine what the rules are for the whole game for the well for that for that round you play three rounds in the game those four cards that's all they're there for to tell you the rules for that round and yet that first blind play test the players spent I don't know 10 minutes flicking back and forth through the rules trying to work out how do they pick up these cards how do those cards get into their hand how do they use the other cards the cards that that aren't on the table which essentially should be put back in the box and I'm sure it says factor set up but they'd made an assumption that because there were cards on the table at some point they should be able to pick that up and put that in their hand that had never occurred to me that rulebook I think was pretty well written it covered everything that you must do but it didn't cover what you shouldn't do which is pick up the cards and so I had to go back to that rulebook and put a little note in there you know note important note in this game these cards are never removed from the table or taken into your hand something along those lines I can't remember exactly how I worded it but sometimes you've got to get something in there that's a reminder to a player that this game works a little bit differently to other other games because the players will be making assumptions and sometimes those assumptions will be wrong again learning the game oceans I've got to undo a whole lot of learning that I did when I learnt the game evolution or evolution climate because there are key things in there that are very similar but work differently and so my assumptions are going to throw me when I play that game for the first time this is where blind testing is really really useful watching the other players learn the game and this I mean there's three different types of blind test there's blind test where you give the game to somebody they take it away they learn it they play it and then they give you a written report and you see none of it apart from the written notes I'm not that keen on that type of blind test personally I want to see people play in the game and struggling with it and work out where they're struggling and why but even with that there's two different versions I could give them the rulebook asked them to learn it in front of me and teach it to the other players and then play and I can see that whole process or I could give them the rulebook in the game allow them to learn it in their own time and then the blind play test would be me watching them teach it to other players and see what assumptions they've made that second one is probably a bit more natural it's a bit more like how we normally learn games you don't normally learn a game with someone staring over your shoulder looking at you you learn it at home and then you take you teach it but I'm missing sort of watching half of the process if I do it that way I don't get to see how long it takes them to read that rule book how much they struggle with it how much they're flicking back and forth looking for certain rules so I think there's a place for both of those type of blind tests and maybe you know maybe doing both of them as part of your process okay so going back to key principles to writing your rules is how much do we repeat ourselves in the rules I think repetition can be confusing to the players why are we going over this again is this different to what was referred to previously certainly if it's worded in a slightly different way so I would try and avoid repetition aside for anything else you want your rules to be short you don't want them to be long and daunting and unapproachable but I do think summaries are useful so maybe this is in a colored box off to one side and it summarizes everything that you've learned so far okay or about that particular area of the rules I think examples are really useful and images particularly so if you can put some images and talk through an example of a game turn using player names I think that can be really really valuable when you've written your rules askew so how difficult was it how difficult was it to explain your game how many pages did it take you the key I think one of the core things that game designers need to realize is that their game is I don't know five ten times more complicated than they think it is every single time okay even with I've got a very very simple game that's recently come onto the market called Quizzle it doesn't have many rules and and you know and to me it's about the simplest game that I've ever made and yet I explained it to some people and they're just not quite grasping what's going on and you realize that to them it's not simple and I don't know it's all wait there they're always more complicated than you think they are and the rules length the amount of pages that it takes to explain those concepts gives you a clue as to how complex your game is one thing that designers will often is take a rule book from an existing published game this is particularly what you know new designers might do and I think it's really valuable for new designers as an exercise so take a you know I might take a rule book from I don't know became cacao or something and I think right I'm gonna base my structure on how the rules to cacao are written and that is a really good exercise although you've got to remember again as I said previously some publishers do a terrible job so basing on their rule book is going to make your rules pretty awful too that's not I can't remember how good the rule but cacao is it may be fantastic so that's casting aspersions on cacao but take care when you're basing on a rule book and one thing that you might want to do is even at that very early stage when you're first writing your rules have in mind which sort of publisher might I I give this game to if I in the perfect world who would publish this game for me and then get one of their rule books so if I'm thinking okay cosmos this is a cosmos games through and through in a very early stages I want to show this to cosmos then I want to get a rule book from a cosmos game box and base my structure on that now even if it's not cosmos that ends on ends up taking on the game I've based it on a structure and it's laid out sensibly and when I do to it to cosmos I'm giving myself the best possible chance so I think it's always useful to have a publisher in mind even from an early stage what's the format of the rule books that I use this is I mean this is fairly standard better I mean rule books do vary I start with a very brief passage about the theme just very brief I want to briefly explain what we're doing I then list the components and I try and have that alongside and image of the set up I then talk through the set up and I reference that image and I put numbered sort of reference points on the image so that we know what I'm talking about I then explain the goal of the game much like when I'm teaching the game verbally I want the players to know how to win what am i aiming for a very brief overview comes next so the game is made up of this many rounds each round has this many turns and in a turn you have this many actions that you can take okay and I might start to introduce some iconography and say these are the sort of the key things this is when this says this it's referring to this this is referred to this and so on well then get into the detail of the gameplay so what does a turn look like okay and then what happens at the end of a turn how do we reset for the start of the next players turn how do we reset at the end of a round for the start of the next round then I talk about what happens at the end of the game what brings about the end of the game and how we how we score it okay and remembering to put in some sort of tiebreaker in there if at all possible and then at the very end you've got a little bit of freedom to put in maybe a glossary maybe so glossary of icons a glossary of terms and and just define them or maybe you might want to put in a little bit of strategy a little guide to some basic strategies that you might want to consider in the game or maybe a list of frequently asked questions if there are some key rules that often get forgotten in your game although even better if you can eliminate those rules from your game altogether through play testing take them out and then you don't have to worry about that but if you need to a frequently asked questions can be useful and then if you have a fairly complex game in appendix particularly if you're going to be listing different card abilities and - and talking a little bit more detail about how that card works and how it interacts with other cards then an appendix can be useful I think that's about everything I can tell you about designing a rule book now I am NOT the world's best rule book writer by any means I'm sure I make all sorts of mistakes and and everybody has a different approach so I can tell you this is the only way but this is my approach anyway I hope you found the video useful if you did please watch some of my others on board game geek I'm adding 78 on YouTube Adams board game Wales and I've got loads of videos about game design and on Twitter at board game Wales thank you very much for watching all the best

Channel: Adam in Wales

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Length: 34min 57sec (2097 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020