[snarf21]

You are on the mark. The thing most people hate is learning a new game. My friend's wife refuses to learn new games but is fine playing Terraforming Mars every night (which is not an intro level game). Take games like Ark Nova with an hour teach (literally) and you really really have to want to learn and play that game. It is also why party games and simple card games stay so popular because the rules are always less than 5 minutes.

To make a great rulebook, you probably new two or three diagrams per page for each new concept. So do you have a huge rulebook that is easy to learn from or a small one that is hard to learn from. (The cost and weight factors are pretty negligible.) It also points to the ongoing success of card driven games since you can defer the rules overhead until someone draws the card and they can read the rules themselves as long as the turn structure is fairly simple to jump right in.

Source: I design board games as a hobby and pitch them to publishers.

[pcblues]

I loved playing games I was familiar with because the rules had been finalised with the people I played with, and we had agreed on the ambiguities (they became house rules). We then developed our strategies based on a known and "complete" understanding of the rules, and the fun came from winning based on the mutually understood set of rules, not a strategem that a player extracted from an unread part of the manual. On the other hand, learning a new game is fun when no-one has played it before, and part of the process was agreeing on the rules after a few run-throughs. Illuminati was great like that. Yet so was the Game of Life card game. A complicated game/rulebook is a different beast. I believe it also needs a person willing to teach the game, or learn it on their own, then teach it. It needs a person familiar with the game, and new players willing to invest in the game knowing they will play it together A LOT. That will exists.

[zahlman]

>It is also why party games and simple card games stay so popular because the rules are always less than 5 minutes.

It's worth noting that "simple" games are not always simplistic, especially when they're head-to-head. I've played thousands of games of Haggis (which for two players could be played with an ordinary deck of playing cards and a notepad to keep score) online, and I can tell you that expert-level strategy gets into some pretty deep thinking.

I've also played thousands of games of Dominion online, and got to a level that I'd consider competent - above what almost any casual player would ever reach, but still awful next to real experts. A lot of people seem to hate that game in the board gaming circles I used to hang out in - a lot of players get the impression that simple strategies beat more complex ones, and the endgame is boring because you most often acquire victory points via otherwise-useless cards that clog your deck. But on a large fraction of possible "kingdoms" (and the random choice of card piles adds a huge amount of variety to the game), there are complex "engines" available that crush the simpler strategies. It's just that you actually have to learn how to implement them, which simply does not flow directly from a mechanical description of what the cards do no matter how well you teach it.

Which is to say, yes, card-driven games have some huge advantages - both when the cards define new rules space (the Dominion / Fluxx / M:tG way), but also just when they're a relatively simple component of an abstract, heads-up, imperfect information game (the Haggis / poker way). The latter benefit, I think, from a higher level of general expertise: children are commonly taught to play various sorts of card games, so they're a very familiar implement that can draw on a lot of powerful design language (set collection mechanics, numerical "ranks" vs symbolic "suits", etc.).

[vintermann]

Spiel des Jahres quality games always have great rulebooks. Dominion, for all its complexity, has a very simple rulebook, and even all the corner cases you can run into with the countless expansion cards, have pretty neat "from the basic principles of the game" resolutions, usually obvious in retrospect. It is a very clean, rigorous design.

The same can't be said for games like Root. Which may have become more common in recent years, it's about 10 years since I was really into modern board games, so I don't know. But I suspect it's still the case that good designers and experienced publishers write good rulebooks.

[zahlman]

As it happens, I was taught Dominion by other players, but really learned it from online play and other such resources. It's the sort of game with depth that exceeds most players' patience - extremely replayable, but only if you don't really care about the fact that the theming is paper-thin (literally, in a sense) and happen to get captivated by the core mechanics (and the variety offered by the expansions).

This was way back in the Isotropic days, before there was an official client. So you could play games very quickly without any of the physical card manipulation at all, never mind shuffling. (It was a very minimalist client that didn't try to simulate any of that card movement with animations; it just immediately updated hand and pile contents and resource counts.)

I guess it's really just not for everyone.

(A story: years ago I tried to design my own deck-building board game which borrowed several Dominion mechanics - but you would play out your cards physically like tiles; instead of an action-counting mechanic or an Action/Treasure dichotomy, there were restrictions on what cards could be adjacent to each other. The feedback I got was overwhelming in its consistency: the more it played like Dominion, the less people liked it. But without that anchor I was lost in terms of designing something that made sense and had anything like game balance, and eventually I gave up.)

[vintermann]

My opinion, maybe unpopular, is that if you really want to feel like you're managing a medieval kingdom (or whatever) then computer games are just better anyway. For anything that gets the slightest bit like a simulation, you want to let the computer do the bookkeeping.

But even for computer games, after you've played for hundreds of hours of say Civilization, and especially if you approach it competitively, you hardly feel like the Hittites anymore. By then, it's just an abstract game for you, and you're OK with it or you'd have quit long ago.

[snarf21]

I would say (largely) even good designers don't write great rulebooks. It is a total different skill set. The best analogy is that Publishers are to Rulebooks what Software Releases are to QA. It is always left to the end and rushed out the door. There is an assumption that between social media and BGG and How to Play videos that people will figure it out.

[vintermann]

Well, there's two steps. To write a good rulebook, you need good rules first. You need to really think about it like a programmer, in terms of procedures, invariants, completeness etc. So that when you, when you play your own game, you don't constantly run into rules questions that you have to stop and settle. If you do have clear and consistent rules in your head for your own game, then writing a good manual is just craftmansship, that you can even get in a professional technical writer to do for you.

But as all programmers know, your mental model of your program is probably full of holes and dubious logic. And so it will often be for board games. Then a technical writer can't save it.

[snarf21]

Playing Dominion online is a LOT more enjoyable in person. The constant shuffling wears pretty thin pretty quick! :)

[bluGill]

Large complex games can be fun. But they require investment, if you don't have a group who will play the game with you "often" then they are not worth learning. Meanwhile I can teach someone a card game in a couple minutes, play for some time over a meal and never see that person again.