Tom Vasel - How to write an excellent board game
Watch it Played - Rules for rule books
Geoff Engelstein and Gil Hova - Writing a rulebook for your board game
Calli Wright - Tips for writing board game rules
Adam in Wales - Secrets to writing clear, concise, and compelling board game rulebooks
Cogito Design - Top ten tips for writing a rulebook
Mike Selinker - Ten rules for writing rules
Tim Chuon - How to write a good board game rulebook
Pam Walls - Avoid these ten common mistakes when writing board game rules
Jesse Ross - How to write a rulebook
I couldn't do any of these presentations justice, but I'll jot down some random notes that stuck out to me:
- A good general format is: Introduction, overview / objective, components, setup, rules, conclusion
- Speak simply and directly; avoid the passive voice
- Use the same word to refer to the same thing, and do not invent random words
- Do not emphasize too many words or phrases at once, and format consistently
- Use pictures to break up walls of text and let people know what they're looking at
- If you're having trouble writing a given rule, your rule is too complex
- Rules have to serve as both a tutorial and a reference, which creates tension; two rulebooks might help, like Catan
- Define a term before you refer to it in another context
Mike Selinker mentioned the reading level of a rulebook, which I hadn't thought about. I ran my rulebook through the Flesch-Kincaid calculator and it came back with a 7th-grade reading level, which sounds oddly simple, but I think this is a roughly appropriate level. (The average reading level in the US is 7th to 8th grade, which is kind of depressing. But a while back I heard that presidents speak around the 8th grade level for exactly that reason, so my rulebook is in good company.)
I couldn't think of a way to say this graciously and succinctly - Geoff Engelstein didn't have to time to elaborate - but in passing, they said that you should treat your players like they're dumb. I think this means that if someone can misinterpret a rule, then eventually someone will misinterpret it. There's another interesting tension here, where you don't want to repeat yourself because then people think you're wasting their time, but if something is crucial, you may have to repeat it so they actually understand it.
Watch it Played mentioned some of the esoteric ways that people say how to choose the first player. When I see these, they make me wince, and I wish designers wouldn't include them. They often feel like a blend of incredibly specific ("You go first if you most recently rode a llama backward through the Yucatan peninsula") and embarrassing ("In this game, you are a group of plumbers who must fix the city's sewers, and player one is whoever most recently had explosive diarrhea"). I much prefer something like the youngest player goes first, some simple chance event, or choose among yourselves.
One person recommended including a table of contents, while another said that you should only do that if your rulebook is over 12 or 16 pages. I believe my rulebook is a bit under 8 pages, so I'm guessing we won't need a TOC.
The adage about not having a rule if you can't clearly explain it makes a lot of sense. Last year, I played a great game that a new designer made, but I had to have him explain the whole thing to me because I couldn't make any sense of the rulebook. That sort of thing must haunt designers and ultimately crater sales.
Anyway, I don't have a meaningful way to conclude this, but I wanted to throw it out there, and I'd be happy to watch or read any other guides that people know about. I did briefly search on here for written guides, but depressingly, all of the links I had clicked on had died - it seems like a lot of the internet is rotting.
