Need comments on rules

Hey!

I need you guys to check out the attached rules and let me know if:
they are clear - can you understand the game from reading these rules
if you had issues, where were you confused?

And what about the character art found in the rules - like them, don't like them?

any other comments?

Appreciate it.

EDIT: I can't seem to find the attachment (unless it needs approval)? If it doesn't show, please pm me with your email addy and I'll send it to you.

How long is the rulebook?

About eleven inches. Sort of a stupid question Barney.

Sorry. How long across?

Can you just upload it online and link it here? I'm sure at least a few of us with no lives and nothing better to do will give it a browse.

I don't have a place to put it online but I sent out a bunch of emails to those that pm'ed me. the rules are 8 pages, smaller than 8.5 x 11 sized paper.

Black Barney wrote: Sorry. How long across?

Girth is what matters, Barney. Paint can.

So yeah, questions and comments;

1) I think it should be made clear under 'recruitment', that you can roll the dice as many times as you want until you either farkle or decide to end your turn.

2) What are 'scoring dice'? If the event die is a scoring die, can I set it aside? This should be made clear.

3) So under 'recruitment' it says you must set aside at least one scoring die, then under 'risk and reward' it says if all my dice score, I may reroll all the scoring dice. So I get back the dice that have been set aside?

4) Let's say I roll a straight and a dragon, what happens? They score, but they don't score. They get set aside, then none remain, so I get them back? It's a little confusing.

5) The scoring table should be ordered by number of soldiers gained. Reverse order 3 twos - 3 sixes. Just personal preference.

6) Honestly, the play examples do a better job of explaining the rules than the actual rules do.

I think brawling will take a long time and bore the other players who are not involved. This game is for 2-5 players, but I think it would be faster and more fun with lesser than greater number of players.

Applejack wrote: So yeah, questions and comments;

1) I think it should be made clear under 'recruitment', that you can roll the dice as many times as you want until you either farkle or decide to end your turn.

2) What are 'scoring dice'? If the event die is a scoring die, can I set it aside? This should be made clear.

3) So under 'recruitment' it says you must set aside at least one scoring die, then under 'risk and reward' it says if all my dice score, I may reroll all the scoring dice. So I get back the dice that have been set aside?

4) Let's say I roll a straight and a dragon, what happens? They score, but they don't score. They get set aside, then none remain, so I get them back? It's a little confusing.

5) The scoring table should be ordered by number of soldiers gained. Reverse order 3 twos - 3 sixes. Just personal preference.

6) Honestly, the play examples do a better job of explaining the rules than the actual rules do.

I think brawling will take a long time and bore the other players who are not involved. This game is for 2-5 players, but I think it would be faster and more fun with lesser than greater number of players.

Let me answer here: And this is not to belittle your comments - which I appreciate. Just want to make sure nothing was missed.

1: It says under Recruitment and under the other sections: You then have the option to end your turn and add the accumulated Soldier Tokens (and any Magic Items) to your army or
continue rolling the remaining dice and the Event Die to try and increase your
recruitment for the turn.

Did you miss that sentence or was it ambiguous?

2: the event die is not a scoring die since it has no value. If you look at the soldier table you need to make singles, trips, etc in order to score. Also in the Event die section it does say it has one dragon, one soldier and 4 blanks and it describes what the two icons do.

3: Yes. We did not want your turn to end cause you had no dice left to score: if you were willing to continue to press your luck and you had set aside all your dice, you roll all of them to continue recruitment. Remember at this point you have set aside soldier tokens already so you know how many you have coming to you should you stop rolling (and not farkle).

4: So you lose 2,500 soldiers to the dragon but your turn does not automatically end so if you choose to roll again you take all the dice and continue your turn.

5: can't comment much on that.

6: The examples are there to solidify the concepts in the rules. I do that every chance I can get. I even present rare cases at times in order to prevent FAQs. If you did not have the rules I don't think the examples by themselves would be enough to teach the game.

And what is amazing is that I an teach the rules in under 5 minutes (and have) but you just can't write it that way.

Thanks for reading!
Zev

I got what I needed. Thanks for volunteering!

If I remember, next time I finish a ruleset I will ask you guys to check it out.

So folks know, here's what I sent back:

Style Related

• You have eight styles of text before I get to the example. Heading, normal, italic, bold-italic, bold, underline-italic, underline-bold-italic, Heading 2, plus a couple font size changes. Do these all mean different things? If not, try to reduce.
• Consider using "Wannabe" in the Objective and example areas, but "player" in the rules.
• Write out numbers less than 10. Example,"All 6 Soldier dice" --> "All six soldier dice" (or even just "All Soldier dice.")
• Justification problems under the bellydancer image.
• Using a. and b. as choice delimiters is dreadful (under Event Die explanation). Almost anything else is better. Even just em-dashes would be better.
• Don't Proper Case "six-sided" on the component list.

Rules Related

• Recommend a small line drawing of setup (decks, soldiers pile, space for discards? and so forth), then you can have fewer words. Example: "Give each Wannabe a reference card. Then shuffle the Companion cards and Magic Item cards separately and place them in the center of the play area, face down, to form decks," could just be: "Give each Wannabe a reference card. Shuffle the Magic Item and Companion decks and place them face down in the center of the play area." You could just bolt on "..adjacent to the Soldier tokens" and let the line drawing "explain" where things go.
• Companion card explanation is way overdone.
• "Soldier Table" made me think the Dragon and Soldier faces appeared on Soldier dice, but reading further on, I see those are just d6s. I would call this an Outcome Table or Result Table or Recruitment Table or something instead.
• If you are this far along this is probably too late, but making the Event Die something other than white would help. Similarly, marking the 1* and 5* faces would be nice because of their unique Farkle status as scoring even in singletons.
• My instincts say 6-of-a-kind is under-rewarded. That's a 1:7776 roll there. That is a RARE event. A completely natural Yahtzee is 1:1296, and how many times have you seen that happen? To only get 500 more soldiers than a straight, which I think is 10:648 (check my math there) seems like a bum deal.

All that said, game looks fun! I had no problems navigating the Recruiting/Brawling/Dragoning modes. Good luck!