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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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).
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.