Barnestorming #128- Branham on Descent 2, Rules Writing, Hot

FFG rulebooks have always been at least okay. Magic Realm has a very tough rule book, and Hunter: Deadly Prey has a horrible rule book. I'm still not sure if the Elric boardgame is actually a playable game.

You lost me with the incoherent milch & gurken analogy.

That's exactly how I feel about the Napoleon's Triumph rules, which *some* people tout as being an awesome rulebook. Even just giving short thematic explanations for the bizarre mechanics would have helped ENORMOUSLY for remembering them, not to mention the designer's ludicrous idea that figuring out how to use the rules to do anything is part of the game. Just give some fucking examples, please.

About the Mage Knight rules: the one thing that would have REALLY helped is if the rules that are new to the rulebook (i.e. not in the walkthrough) had been highlighted in some way. We had rules problems for several games because of all the rules that are not in the walkthrough that were lost in the vast sea of text when I read through the actual rulebook. There are also things that are just flat-out confusing/contradictory-sounding in that rulebook, some poor word choices. I don't think of those rules as being any kind of paragon of rules-writing.

Vlaada in general writes *the best* rulebooks, though.

HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU NOT LIKE COMEDY???

And yes, Vlaada writes the best rulebooks.

Comedy is for the weak and cowardly.

Vlaada understands that he's putting over some fairly intricate, sometimes very novel games and he's not afraid to take the time and due dilligence to explain them properly. He's not afraid of giving you a 30 page rulebook, and he's got the wherewithal (and the right editors) to explain the games properly.

There's a problem when you equate long-form rules with complexity. That's not always the case.

Napoleon's Triumph is a HORRIBLE rulebook, and it's actually the reason I don't own the game anymore. Marengo had a bad one too. There's all these new concepts...and they don't really make a lick of sense unless you're heshing it out with someone else and spending more time figuring them out than actually playing the game. Maybe that's the point, maybe that's what folks that play those games want.

I'd actually put Napoleon's Triumph as the worst rulebook I've ever read. Actually, maybe Magic Realm, since I've never actually been able to figure out how to play it, even with Realmspeak, except there I've tried multiple rulebooks, so it's probably not the rulebook-writer's fault.

Every time Barnes says this I pretty much assume that there's some bizarre language barrier between California and Georgia and that "comedy" in Georgia has some ultra-specific meaning. Because otherwise it's a completely ludicrous statement, and now that he's mentioned that his wife "doesn't like comedy" either, the idea that there could be *two* people in the world who don't like comedy pushes it to being impossible.

It's probably worth making a distinction between good rules with bad rulesbooks, and bad rules, with good rulesbooks. The major problem with Magic Realm is that the rules are unnecessarily complex. Specifically, the combat system is a nightmare of inconsistent treatment for different types of combatants. The rulebook is probably a very reasonable attempt at explaining those horribly complex rules.

Maybe he means modern comedies....which are fairly sophomoric and just disappointing.

@Space Ghost: Agree with that. I'm utterly lost as to how so many of my friends think that The Hangover is the FUNNIEST MOVIE EVAR! I laugh more at most of the Marx Bros. movies that I've seen 20 times.

Needs more boner jokes.

Also, Mage Knight has fucking terrible rules. But I also don't like any rules he's written in general. Fuck all that walkthrough shit; it's so fucking impossible to reference or find something specific you are looking for.

Worst rules ever though has to go to Return of the Heroes. "Oh hey, it's Ballzac the dwarf. What's up dude, you wanna tell us about how to use items in combat?"

I just spent a fair amount of time this past week being the note taker for cold play tests of a game that is in development. Whenever someone asked a rule question, I wrote wrote it down. Whenever someone played the game incorrectly I wrote it down. It was an real eye opening experience. In most cases it was the really simple stuff that was omitted, glossed over, buried, or not clearly explained.

Mage Knight's rulebook is a fucking wall of text. Or, more precisely, two fucking walls of fucking text, and you have to read both of them to know everything you need to play any scenario other than the introductory one.

The funny thing is, once you somehow managed to understand it (likely by playing the game a couple of times, while referencing the rulebooks constantly), you realize that the rules are not that complex at all. If anything, Vlaada seems to think that his rules are more complex than they really are, so he explains them in excruciating details, as if the players were 5-year-olds.

And don't get me started on the rulebook of Through the Ages, which is broken into 3 parts, for Simple, Full and Advanced game, and the latter two only contain rules that are missing from the previous ones. Which is great (I guess) for learning the game the first time, but a pain in the ass, when you go back to the game after a significant amount of time, and want to play with the Advanced rules again.

I'm not saying that FFG's rulebooks are the best, they could use a cleaner layout, paragraph numbering, and a better index page (if there's one at all, that is), not to mention that they usually don't get every rule right the first time, but at least I never felt lost reading them.

i second Napoleon's Triumph as worst rule book (that i've read) based on the fact that i still don't understand the game. If ever there was a rule book that really needs an example of play its NT. Second place probably goes to Poseidon. Its a light 18xx game designed for newbies which has a rule book that seems to assume a vast knowledge of 18xx. I like the Mage Knight Rules, i found them easy to learn. Cross referencing in the full rule book could have been better, and having all the info on the location cards also in the rules would have helped.

Also Republic of Rome and High Frontier have dubious rule books.

All I know is that I was able to crack open the Mage Knight "game walkthrough" book at a con and learn the game directly from the book. For a game of that complexity, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, it took us about 4 hours to play the first scenario, but it broke everything down for us as we went. That has put me in awe of those rules, no matter what anyone says.

Vlaada's rulebooks are great for explaining his games, but since they are usually broken into multiple parts or multiple books, it can be tough to look stuff up. This has also proven to be in issue with FFG. I generally am fine with their rules, but every now and then there's one that throws stuff everywhere. For whatever reason, the Wiz-War rulebook has proven to be almost worthless for looking stuff up. Just piss-poor organization.

I love GMT rulebooks, just because of the historical background they give.

The whole rules fiasco for Road to Enlightenment is unforgivable. UNFORGIVABLE! So when it starts to really piss you off, Mike, let me know and I'll buy the game off you to save you from further stress.

:)

Another middle finger for the Mage Knight Rules. No index, and there is stuff in the walk through that isn't in the rulebook. CONSTANT flipping back and forth between two books to find shit. This is not like GMT, which firmly divides rulebook from playbook .

And I do sort of agree about Portlandia. It's funniest the first time you see it, and after that it expects you to just keep laughing at Portlanders. There are moments when it can elevate to surreal heights, and that's when I like it best. But usually it only deserves a mild chuckle.

I've recently fought against Lost Valley I snatched in Prague last autumn. It's a case of too short rules: there are 4 pages of rules and a diagram showing the layout of the game. If you do not ready every small notice on the diagram you'll be lost (in the Valley). The problem with too short rules is that the reader does not remember every word they read, so the shortest possible rules are not a good idea. Haggis was another case where I straggled because I was unfamiliar with the basic concept and the rules did explained everything, in some parts of sentence, some words on the left, some examples on player aid and other tiny bits easy to be missed.

I had the similar problem, from the opposite end with Android. The rules are nicely written as the introduction and learning the game. They just completely forgot they are a reference source as well and finding not in any way highlighted crucial rules in 30 pages block-o-text wasn't appreciated. What they would need is just one page with all the rules noted, but I guess, the graphic design artists would foam at their mouths if they had to omit some of neat illustrations for that.

Just read Space Alert yesterday and I agree with Barnes - Vlaada knows that he makes unique games, therefore they are harder to teach to unfamiliar players, hence special care must be taken to write the rules to provide both the learning of the game and the reference. It's done as in Mage Knight with 2 rules - rules and tutorial. Another important thing is that tutorial in Space Alert has a funny black comedy routine going on and therefore gives you the right set of mind needed in order to play this game - it hints at the right atmosphere. Another good rulebook I've read recently was Dominant species - true the game itself is fairly procedural, but the flow of the game and rulebook mimicking it completely made the quite heavy game relatively easy to grasp.

So rulebooks have to do 2 tasks: teaching the game and help you play the game (reference). The reference is basically all the rules on their own. I think even with heavier games, rules could probably all be wrtten on 2-4 pages, but these would be so condensed one would need a reference on what the game is about. Hence rulebooks are about narrative with the task of giving you an idea what the game is about - the general layout, the flow, the feel and so on. Once you get this general idea, you can check the short rules themselves (reference).

A Place to Bury Strangers is so sick, seen em three times and it is a pretty overwhelmingly live experience.

I disagree about Napoleon's Triumph rulebook. It's written in such a concise manner that there are no vague situations left where you have to "intrepret" any rule. It's a fully complete rulebook. There are also examples of play, so I suspect the other poster that complained about the lack of them didn't actually read the whole thing.

The reason NT is a hard game to learn is that you can't start with any familiar concepts from other games to use as a jump start for learning NT. Something like Mage Knight is easy to learn, you have familiar deck building concepts on the cards, resource cubes, movement points, levelling up, etc.

I downloaded 10000000 yesterday and beat it in about 4 hours. Entertaining game for what it is, I suppose

Puh-lease. Yeah, I couldn't make it through the 8-page rulebook...more like I read it back-to-back 10 times trying to understand how the hell to play the game, and gave my second copy to a buddy to read so we could work together. Yes, there are "examples of play", but my memory is that they're very very tiny: here is this rule, now here is a tiny example of it, instead of showing how it works together with the other rules. I felt like none of the examples covered what I wanted covered, and we actually found that there were absolutely rules that needed to be "interpreted"; I'll get you an example tonight.

Sigh. Minimally, NT needed a playbook that showed how to play a full turn. Even the game's author has admitted this in retrospect.

Anyway, I hate to keep saying this, but whether or not a rulebook is good is NOT a theoretical question. You can debate the merits of a rulebook all you like, but the only thing that matters is whether people know how to play the game properly when they're done reading the rules. (Or, in the case of NT, after they're done reading the rules five times.)

Given that Napoleon's Triumph has 33 pages of rules questions on the BGG forums, it's clear that the NT rulebook fails in its stated task: to help players learn the game. You can argue that would-be NT players are dumb, that they aren't reading the rules carefully, etc., but I just don't buy it.

By the way, Napoleon's Triumph is a great game. But the rules suck. That's where the fan-driven player aids come in.

wkover: By that logic you could argue that practically all rule books are failures. For example, I was answering forum rules questions when Last Night On Earth first came out, and 95% of the time the answer was page n, paragraph x. It's not that players are dumb. It IS partially that they aren't reading the rules carefully. But mostly it's that they don't think about what they've read because it's easier to ask on a forum and get spoon fed the answer.