Clarity, Brevity and Respect: On Rulebook Creation for Games

The initial inspiration for this topic came from the book, Tabletop Wargames: A Designers’ and Writers’ Handbook. That casts a much more wide-ranging net on design principles, but here I’m looking at no more than a few paragraphs that it talked about regarding rulebook design.

But the points made, however brief, resonated with me, and I wanted to expand on them here.

What Makes a Good Game Rulebook?

This is an unanswerable question in the aggregate. Too much is based on context.

What genre is the game in? What is the expected knowledge level of the audience? Or age range? What concepts might be difficult in the game, and how can you best describe them?

These are questions with specific answers depending on the game, but no universal answers.

Moreover, talk to 10 different gamers and they’ll give you 10 different lists of what they expect to see, or like to see, in a rulebook. It will be impossible to please all 10.

But rather than stop there and throw up our hands in resignation and frustration, I posit that there is at least one idea I can state with some confidence:

1. While the specifics of rulebook design are too varied to pin down, certain principles can be applied that should inform all rulebooks.

What are those principles? There may be several we could use, but the three I want to talk about are the ones the book mentions, each of which I agree with.

Clarity in Game Rulebooks

You want your rulebook to be clear, right?

Of course, but what exactly does that mean? Well, it could mean several things.

For one, it means using unambiguous terminology. For more technical game systems, it’s probably worth defining major terms near the start so that your readers know exactly what you mean.

Then you have to be careful not to conflate or confuse terms as you use them. Are you using “action” and “turn” interchangeably, for example? Why is this, and could your audience become confused as a result?

What’s the difference in your game between a round, a phase, a turn, and an action? Do you need each, or should you collapse the terms used to a smaller number?

Even staying in the same tone of voice, with the same perspective in the writing, can avoid confusion. These are things that a good editor should catch, but they’re also things you can look for.

For some genres or games, this could also necessitate a glossary. It makes the whole of some rulebooks more clear. Players are able to find information more easily.

Brevity in Game Rulebooks

What’s the shortest sentence that can be used to explain a rule without risking misunderstanding and maintaining clarity? It’s worth your time to find it.

This relates to learning a game, and also referencing rules during play. Save the flowery language for the setting description and flavor text. When it comes to rules, excessive filler words can make this process more difficult, which in turn will frustrate players more.

Respect in Rulebooks

Here’s the part where you’re asked to remember that there’s another person on the other end of this process, reading your rulebook. What does this realization necessitate?

First is the acknowledgement that they’re investing their precious time to read your rules. So you owe it to them to do two things:

1. Make the rulebook thorough
2. Make it fun

“Fun” will look different for different games. It might be a change in tone. It might be interesting historical anecdotes from the time period being addressed in the game, even if these facts are more sobering than hilarious (e.g. World War II). It might be comments in the margins with helpful reminders from your game’s mascot.

Thorough is easier to define. Any rule or game system that needs an example to make clear, should have one. Purists might say this clashes with our Clarity principle above. But what good is brevity if it sacrifices understanding? The best rulebooks leave very little to misinterpretation by having definite game states in their examples that walk through all steps and possible edge cases.

If possible, make these examples visual as well. Some learn by reading, others by seeing something. You’ll want to help both types.

Include FAQs. Consider that you might miss something and need to “patch” it with a rule after the game is published. How will players find these updates? Is there a URL, QR Code or publisher website in the rulebook pointing them toward additional resources?

It’s easy to see when a rulebook treats its audience with respect. And it’s not when the rulebook seems to be doing the bare minimum as a rules explainer but when there are little personalized touches in the copy or visuals and where everything is thoroughly explained in ways that make onboarding easier.

Putting It All Together

Are there other principles I think should inform most or all game rulebooks? Yes. That’s beyond the purview of this article, though I may discuss them in a future article.

The point, though, is that these three principles aren’t the only enviable qualities in a rulebook. They are, however, excellent conceptual guideposts that can help with your rulebook planning, copywriting, design and printing.