Untap Your Coloured Resources

I just watched the wonderful Shut Up And Sit Down‘s equally wonderful Paul Deen review 504, a game that I would not have touched with a long barge pole based on any one of a dozen factors. I mean, call me a skinflint but I don’t have half a rent cheque to drop on a game whose box description sounds like an attempt to generate maximally marketable catchphrases codesigned by a mathemetician and a marketer. Nonetheless, the dreadfully boring rules spiderweb that is 504 isn’t important to me, but what is is a game design pitfall it crafts, then throws itself into headlong. That is:

Theme your rules.

I don’t just mean that your rules – the actual ways the games work – should reinforce the theme you have in your game (though they bloody well should), but rather, the way you explain the rules of your game should be themed well too.

In Middleware, the game is structured heavily and a lot of the systems you oppose are automated. The rules are very crisp, and use formal language, with consistant wording structures.

In Lily Blade, the rules are super simple, but all the cards explicitly refer to your opponent as her or she. This is because in the universe of the game, you are girls duelling, so the rules text can thematically bear that out.

In Crowdfund This, the game’s rules are both short and incredibly sour. The entire point of that game is it’s meant to be something you can explain in a few seconds and it’s about people who are kind of annoying, so the tone of the rulebook is short, sharp and vicious. It doesn’t have to explain everything tightly!

And of course, The Botch. God, I am happy with The Botch‘s rulebook. I am happy with a rulebook that reads when spoken aloud like a snarling low-end dockers crook telling you how the game gets played.

In each case, I approached writing the rules as if the rules are part of the game. It is certainly easier to make rules that can be handled like you’re trying to program a human, but that task makes them hard to remember, hard to communicate, and it means the rules feel apart from the game. If you write your rulebook as if it’s from the world it’s in, you can use other tricks (like consistent vocabulary or blocking key words) to convey information to players without ever needing to overdefine things… and when the rules don’t work, if the players are in the theme space, if they’re happy with it – the tone and theme will carry them over those rough spots.