This is how I finally learned all of the correct rules for Scythe 
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I got started with a game of Dead Men Tell No Tales this morning, having read the rules last night. I went in confident that I had understood well how to run the game, and here I am an hour later—interrupting said game no less!—only just finishing my third round. I’m taking a breather, to use the game’s terminology, because it struck me that this was a case of three rulebook situations really clashing.
Firstly, it’s clear they desperately wanted the game to be four folded pages (8 total). The rules themselves are quite simple, but there is an awful lot going on between board fiddle, a long list of actions, chain reactions and game state interrupts. There really isn’t an awful lot of space needed to explain each individual component, but you can probably guess all that guff adds up to complicated situations fast.
The rulebook makes only the most cursory notes of a few edge cases. There are next to no examples (with or without edge cases demonstrated). These are the second and third issues coming together to really make this a mess of a first play. I think we should let a game off the hook if a proper edge case is found which isn’t explicitly covered in the manual, provided they were as airtight as possible in the first place. If your “edge cases” are just the way the game operates, you have poorly explained your mechanisms and their most common interactions.
This is 8 pages that needed to be 16, with a reference card that needed to be a sheet. This wasn’t efficient, it was cheap. Anyway thankfully there’s a comprehensive FAQ and the game is pretty fun. This stuff will iron out easily after a play or two, so not the end of the world in the long term.
[EDIT] Does anyone know how many pages original Pandemic is? This is pandemic-like in the extreme and from memory it might have been even fewer pages? I don’t have particularly fond memories of reading through that one but I also never had any questions that couldn’t be resolved with it. Might make for a fine counterpoint.
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The rule book for the current edition of Pandemic appears to be 8 pages long. It is available as a pdf from Z-Man Games’ website if it is of interest.
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It is not. Heheh. But that 8 pages confirmation was, for sure! If nothing else I can confirm I played Pandemic long before I got into BGG and I sure never felt compelled to get any clarification online. The FAQ for Dead Men Tell No Tales is essential reading.
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My 2011 Pandemic rule book is also 8 pages. That will be the “2011 English second edition reprint” following English first and second editions in 2008, and prior to the newer design which seems to have happened 2012 (to my surprise… I thought that was later). A BGG comment for the 2008 second-edition says “A second printing, nearly identical to the first Z-Man edition.” so I suspect my rule book is representative of the original one, and maybe they didn’t see any need to change it much if at all for the newer revisions? (IIRC it’s a pretty good rule book).
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I played Pax Pamir 2E yesterday and was reminded how much I dislike that rulebook. I seem to end up skimming through the entire thing anytime I want to look anything up, so it’s a good job it’s short!
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The rulebook for Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is very bad indeed.
Caves: mentions them, says you get points for each card under them, doesn’t say how cards could ever be put under them. (It turns out to be actions on individual cards only, and you don’t interact any other way).
Scoring: Apparently “2 points per [thing]” means every time that icon appears anywhere in your forest, and not just related to that card. Scoring isn’t really described in the book apart from one example which lists points for a card, but not where those points came from.
Trees: The only description of trees mentions that they each have only one icon. There is no reason to know this, because you can put animals with ANY icon into any tree. But it doesn’t say that anywhere in the rulebook, you just have to guess that the sentence in the book isn’t relevant and that animals don’t need a specific habitat in this game. This is a bit counter-intuitive.
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This doesn’t make the rulebook better, but it does make the scoring easier:
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My instinct says that they seem to assume that the reader knows how to play the OG. Mind, I have NOT read the OG rulebook
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Yeah, I’m thinking the same. There is a really odd lack of detail in the Dartmoor book.
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Reminds me of tutorials in former ‘early access’ videogames. Once the game gets a full release, the developer is confused as to how their mile-wide, inch-deep videogame seems impeneterable to new players. The tutorials presume you have knowledge of the game already, which is because the feedback has been coming from people who have been playing their game for 2 years already.
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Software interfaces used to be descrived as ‘clear only if known’, and it’s a very common problem in all sorts of situations. It’s very hard to write documentation or instruction that assumes zero knowledge, and picking the right level of assumed knowledge can be difficult. I used to run a telephone switch provisioning computer system for the phone company. After I’d been there a while, I discovered there was a manual for it. The interesting[1] bit was several hundred pages, but the whole thing was almost 10,000, because it included sections explaining the wire protocol that the console keyboard used, and all sorts of other fascinating topics that had all been included by magical troff macros. There was not a section on troff, for some reason.
[1] for suitable values of interesting…
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It’s a trap I’ve seen RPG rulebooks fall into when they’re a “stand-alone” game, but they’re using a ruleset from something else. Just whole rules missing if you’re unfamiliar with the original game.
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I can’t remember which game this was, but I once scoured a rule book multiple times searching for a non-existent definition for a very strange term they’d used, which was entirely meaningless to me.
It turned out that it was a “Magic The Gathering” term, and the people responsible for writing and proof-reading this manual presumably all played Magic and consequently hadn’t given the term a second thought (or else made a bizarre assumption that only Magic players would be interested in their game).
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Th Spirit Island Invaders all have First Strike and Trample while the Dahan lack Banding ( it has been 20+ years )
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Was it “tapping” a card?
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That was a term that WotC had some sort of BS IP claim on, so lots of companies invented new words for it.
When I played an early version of Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate this was very much the feel I got from the rules: so you’ve played Magic, you know how it goes, here’s how this game is different. (I sent in a lot of suggested changes, but I don’t know what may have been included in the final version)
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It was indeed. Which I now understand is “tapped out” in the sense of drained/exhausted, and in practice means “turn the card sideways to show that you’ve used it”, but at the time was a completely incomprehensible phrase to throw into a rule book with no explanation.
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