There’s a common piece of wisdom among designers when talking about rules. There are three people that read your rules: a new player learning how to play, a returning player who has played but needs to be refreshed on specifics or things they’ve forgotten, and a player who reached a point they’ve never encountered before and needs to look up corner-case situations. There are other articles you can find that go into this in more detail, but this article is going to be about coming at it from the other end. So here’s my interpretation of who you are writing for on each draft.

The Player Who Knows How To Play

The first person to read your rulebook will be someone who knows how to play. This is because the first person to read your rulebook is you (or the person who wrote it). This has some pretty clear issues. You’re going to describe things in a way that seems self-explanatory to you. You might also over-correct, and start describing to people incredibly simple concepts like drawing cards or how hands work. I won’t go into too much detail here because it’s what you’ll do by default. Basically, once you’ve got it all written out and free of spelling errors you can move on to your next draft.

The Player Who Doesn’t Know How To Play

So the next pass is about putting yourself into the shoes of a new player. Look through your rules as clear-headed as you can. With every step, think about whether you fully described the rules. Is it referencing something that isn’t actually in the rules? If it isn’t, is what it’s describing still within the realm of what your target audience would know? I find one of the best ways to write this draft is to leave the game shelved for a long enough time that maybe you do forget the rules. It’s risky for sure, but it’ll definitely get you in the mindset of a new player. And, of course, it’s a great idea to pass this off to someone who has never played your game and let them try and figure out what it does.

The Player Who Thinks They Know How To Play

Here’s what inspired me to write this article. When I was going through some games entered into the gamecrafter’s Community Anthology Contest, I kept providing feedback to other entrants about their rules. While I was unable to play any of them in the short judging period, and most didn’t have a video description of how to play, I tried to suggest changes to anything in the rules that looked incorrect. But how would I know the rules were incorrect if I’ve never played it and the rules themselves were all I had?

Because I’m not looking for places were the rules were wrong, I was looking for places where the rules could be wrong. I was looking for places where, if you didn’t know any better, you could read it a certain way and have no concrete proof that you were doing anything wrong.

Sometimes this is done innocently. A player learns a game a certain way, never bothers to look it up because it doesn’t seem wrong, and they might end up playing a worse game because of it (or a better game, which is always funny when that happens). More dangerously, though, is when a player comes upon a situation where they can purposely misconstrue the rules to take advantage of an assumed rule, usually in the middle of a game, and often to the frustration of other players. For example, I looked at a space game where you could colonize a planet to get a bonus. Nowhere in the rules did it say you could only colonize a planet once. It’s clearly implied by the theme, and the planet on the board was small enough it didn’t look like it could fit more than one meeple, but if you wanted that bonus a second time on a planet you already had, the rules had nothing that would stop you.

Conclusion

If everyone who reads the rules correctly figures out how to play the game, that’s good, and that’s important. But it’s just as important that they aren’t able to come to the wrong conclusions if purposely or accidentally mislead. So don’t just read your rules as a pro or a novice, read them like a cheater, too.