Oh gosh. THOUGHTS. But I’m on a phone so no chance to elaborate. I’ll be back later…
I think I’m getting old enough to be crotchety.
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one more on manuals: I went through a few boxes and found some examples 
- Revive does a lot of things right: it has a good overview of components. Has „board anatomy“ sections, per player materials, counts. The format is ca. DinA4/Paper sized. There is an icon glossary. The layout is generally fine. The sections are per type of action you can take and there are illustrations alongside it. It could still be improved but is definitely one of the better ones out there. I still had to reference the manual enough in the early games and I still need it for some of the icons.
- Arnak has a pretty good one. The format is slightly large but fine. Layout is not too dense. It has the component numbers, references, solo-mode included in main rulebook (I prefer that but I guess that‘s a taste issue). It has an icon and a terms glossary on the back of the rulebook.
- Beyond the Sun has the nicest layout—also thematically seems to fit. Very clear font, spacy. But not everything is great. The component list is spread over pages as each component is directly explained. That‘s not ideal.
- Nusfjord has a concise, if a bit dense, layout. Good component list, explanations. It helps that many Rosenberg games are separated into phases that can be explained chronologically. I do remember having to consult the rulebook on details and having a bit of trouble finding stuff. There is also a card reference which I think is very important in games with lots of unique cards.
These are just the obvious glaring things that I checked. I did not reread the rules. I didn‘t learn Beyond the Sun from the rulebook. So maybe it is terrible at teaching. But the overall aspect of these is better than average. Just to have some positive examples.
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Length of teach is a very good idea.
Some that have really short teaches advertise that. „You can learn it in 5 minutes“
But most games have teaches that vary between 10 minutes and an hour and it would be kind of nice to know before buying. Tabling games with 1 hour teach is not impossible but more difficult.
But publishers would likely start understating the length of time it takes—just like play time is often at the low end. But at least we‘d have an estimate.
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But surely length of teach will depend on a) the person teaching it and b) the people they are teaching the game to. Its too subjective
The ‘learn it in 5 mins’ would still work if they’re saying its EASY
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The same is true of play times, of course.
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True and they usually give a range but I think to add the teach and then again say ‘10-60 mins’ just isn’t going to happen. They’ll put people off the game
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Well, maybe we need to introduce length-of-teach as a BGG metric
Or complexity-to-length-of-teach ratio…such a metric then shows which games have better “teachability”
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Perhaps scale length of teach to a reference game: you teach Onitama in 5 minutes, I take 7, so a 10-minute teach for you might take 14 for me?
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Space Biff was talking about rule books on his podcast with the designers of Daybreak. He made some interesting points. He said he really liked the daybreak rule book as (I think) the layout was such that you could grok the game before learning the details of the rules properly (Is this a fair characterisation). He went on to say he didn’t jive with the GMT format which is a lot of indexes or something. I wonder though if you play a lot of them maybe that format becomes “better” and that narrative thing feels woolier and worse.
I think I like the ravensburger/alea/Feld thing in castles of burgandy where it’s like two books in one. A detailed first rule book in the centre and the margins are a summary rule. Although I doubt they are that good to teach. I know I get annoyed that the final scoring page is somewhere half way in because the back half of the book is all clarifications of a million tiles.
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Race for the Galaxy does a similar thing and that worked for me on a second game. (Still too much iconography for my taste, but I can make it work.)
Again personal niggle: if I’m reboxing the game into something smaller, it’s annoying when the manual is the constraint on space.
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One thing that always gets to me is “Custom Dice”. They always shill them like they’re the best thing ever, but I have some of the best dice ever, and they definitely didn’t come from any board game. With all the triple-layer boards, and life-size statues for first player tokens, you’d think they could spare some expense towards the part of the game you handle most. With the cost of all-in pledges nowadays, a $40 increase for decent-quality custom dice would be much more compelling than another expansion for a game I’ve never played.
On a similar note, paper money. We all hate it, right? But I actually like the idea of it, I’ve just never found any that used anything other than the worst possible material. We can use embossed foiled linen on the box, but not the component that represents Wealth? A lot of games switched to chips or tokens, but I wish someone would actually make good paper game money, since buying things with poker chips isn’t exactly immersive to me.
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Have you played Firefly? Personally I can’t stand the game but I will admit it had the best paper money from any board game. Actually felt nice in the hand and was reasonably practical.
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The only good paper money I’ve played are from Imperial 2023 and Ponzi Scheme. I might have missed one, but that’s it.
Printed: I don’t trust the symbols not to wear off. Though I’ve seen a well-used copy of Imperial Settlers and those dice were still legible, so maybe that problem has been solved.
Engraved: now we’re talking.
I have a stack of poker chips in my great big box o’Firefly, and players can use money or chips as they see fit. Combining the two on the table contributes to a suitably seedy and low-rent atmosphere.
Metal coins! They’re lovely! But they’re also expensive! I have the ones for Xia (they’re in every copy) but otherwise I’m inclined to use the generic set I got from SJGames a few years back. Unlike many fancy coins, they have a nice large value number on one side.
I remember looking at a custom coin vendor in Essen and noticing, hang on, these cost a Euro or more each, and I have a pocket full of coins that cost less than that…
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Or just call it a point.
Football (soccer) doesn’t have ‘victory goals;’ cricket doesn’t have ‘victory runs;’ all those lesser sports don’t have ‘victory points.’ They’re just goals, and runs, and points.
So why can’t they just be ‘points’ in board games?
‘Victory points’ is annoying, unnecessary and silly. Not to mention, unless you’re the victorious player, completely inaccurate. For everyone else they’re ‘defeat points.’
THEY’RE JUST POINTS!
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I do love games with metal coins, and have some for Architects of the West Kingdom, Nusfjord and Viticulture (which I also use for Concordia). They can be pricey though, agreed: I was recently looking for metal “credit” coins for space themed games - primarily New Frontiers with its very dull cardboard credit tokens - but the ones I found were far too expensive for the time being.
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Completely agreed with Firefly paper money, definitely one of the better components out there.
And for coins, I must admit metal coins make the difference, but I understand they are pricey. I wonder why none of the big companies has not gone for a set of coins/chips that can be sold independently. There is quite a lot of games out there who would benefit from them, and all I find is obscure companies, which, on a shelf, never filled me with trust.
As a call out to good metal coins, the ones from Shem Phillips games (Architects, Raiders) have always been good, but my new favourites are from Flamecraft. Nice and weighty, but not too big.
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Above and below has multiple card decks with a range of similar or almost identical backs (eg adding a small key to the same image, or a bed, but not always in the same location as the key).
This is poorly explained in the rules and a nightmare to set up and tear down. Also you can’t see the symbol when the card is face up so you’ve no idea for most of the game that the different decks even exist.
There are others guilty of ambiguous deck backs, but that’s the one that springs to mind as the worst. Well, perhaps Arkham horror 2nd ed with all the expansions would given it a run for its money?
Starting cards in rftg wind me up something rotten. Just separate these cards out, shuffle, choose from this many, then shuffle just these ones that weren’t needed back into the previously shuffled deck that we just made you search through. Aaaaargh. Just keep the starting worlds separate for pitys sake! Poor design choice.
The growth tokens in earth. Bloody things cover up all the numbers on the cards telling you how many growth and points if you put them in their clearly marked spot. Did nobody play test this?!
Wingspan - why am I moving this cube along a tiny sliver of player board at the top? I do this action constantly and my brain loses the cube between steps because it’s not on a full size row like the card ones.
Round markers - give me a reason to want to move them or I will forget every time. Quacks is a typical example of a forgettable round marker with no way to work out if you forgot it. Make it a little cauldron that the leader dice goes in and make the leader slide it along when they take the dice - boom, never forgotten! Put the rubies that players can earn on the turn spaces and take or discard them? Problem solved! The player that is in last place gets one extra rat tail if they update the turn number without prompting? When you pass or explode you remove a tag/clip/charm from the string of your draw bag and put in on the round number you’ve completed? There must be a better way than “step 8 slide the wood and don’t forget!”.
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I wonder how many people actually do that. I have always kept the starting worlds separate.
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I’ve always craved a bifurcated metric - complexity to teach vs complexity to play. I have notes in my own database, for the games I know, but my group has a very low threshold for teaching complexity but is very comfortable burning a brain or two while playing.
I like rulebooks that give a framework - here’s the flow, here’s the goal, here are the key things that will get you to key goals… and then deep dive into the how and the details.
I think that’s why I rage against the Pax Pamir rulebook. It does it backward, giving you all these details without context, and then assembles the framework at the end. After which, you have to go back and review all the details because now the implications and interconnections start to make sense.
I think the key question is, are there any other kinds of points? I wonder if somewhere in the hidden past there was a game with a couple different types of points - charisma points, turn order points, and victory points or something. We still have lots of tracks and you can have a “score” along multiple axes but we don’t call anything else points. I wonder…
I have metal coins for Architects, Nusfjord, and Pax Pamir. They are lovely. For some reason, I’m staunchly unwilling to just use these coins for other games where they would apply.
I have one extremely fancy set of poker chips for low value games that serve for Isle of Skye, London, Great Western Trail, Istanbul, Concordia… Then I have a large set of significantly cheaper (composite) chips for high value games like Pipeline or 18xx. I think I’m done with coins, though I’m still tempted whenever they are offered??
We leave the Crystal Ball cards out in an overlapping row for this reason. Never have I made it through an entire game without leaving the round marker behind. I suspect some of my high scores are due to unwitting “extra innings.”
My approach is to fan through the deck face-up and hand out blue-red cards in the order that they appear (after shuffling). Then one more shuffle. Starting pairs are still distributed randomly but you end with a deck that is only missing 2-4 worlds rather than all of them.