[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.