I should probably rewrite it, but the reason the rules document is the way it is is that I was writing it for developers (are you one btw) and so there were a lot of things I didn’t want to be prescriptive about, and I figured they could guess a lot of it as they approached their own understanding of how the game should be and how things fit together, and I want to encourage people to fully own their understanding of the reasons for the rules.
For that, writing in this way actually might be necessary to get people to ask “how should it be” instead of just taking my word as law and not really thinking about the underlying principles.
It says you can move on your turn, but doesn’t specify where you’re allowed to move to (anywhere? adjacent spaces? in a straight line like a rook?)
I’m surprised you wouldn’t just assume I meant one space, given a lack of further details.
It says you can pick up and drop objects on your turn, but “objects” are not mentioned anywhere else on the page and I can’t figure out what this refers to
In this case, the other rules are on the card backs. A lot of them are, which may be part of what’s going on here.
When someone gets a terrible hunger desire, it’s explained on the card that killing creates bodies and bodies can be carried. Object stuff isn’t needed before then. Maybe I should move the mention of object pickup to the hunger card as well, but I’m not sure there’ll always be room on that (I’m considering doing one with a micro deck to support placing cards in the world), and it’s possible that more objects, other than bodies, will be added to the game later.
terms like “nearby”
This one gives me anguish. I don’t think formally defining nearby somewhere would make a better experience for most people and I also don’t want to say “on or adjacent to” 100 times.
there were a lot of things I didn’t want to be prescriptive about, and I figured they could guess a lot of it as they approached their own understanding of how the game should be and how things fit together, and I want to encourage people to fully own their understanding of the reasons for the rules.
I think this is a bad idea. Games are complex machines with many interlocking parts and they trade off between many goals; even an experienced developer can’t generally fill in gaps and expect things to work on the first try. This goes double for you because you are deliberately making an unusual game. Asking people to invent some of the rules is placing a pretty significant burden on them.
And if the designer fails to supply at least one example of a good rule, this makes me question whether they ever successfully found a good option themselves, and whether any possible rule could be filled in that would lead to a good result. (Imagine a blueprint for a perpetual motion machine with a box labeled “you can put whatever you want here.”)
Additionally, an interoperable standard makes it much easier for people to play with strangers. If every friend-group invents their own version, then when they go to a meetup or a con, anyone they meet will have a different version. An official version makes it easier to join a new group.
That’s without even getting into the psychological hangups people have about official rules, which are considerable. I think board games tap into human instincts about societal and ethical rules, and human instincts would like to pretend that there really is a correct rule somewhere in the Platonic realm, and maybe it’s unclear but it can’t just be missing and it’s certainly not up for grabs. I’ve seen people get pretty upset at the suggestion that there is no “right” rule for something because the designer simply never considered it, or that the version 2 of the rules is in some sense “a different game” from version 1. My pet theory is that this is an evolved security measure to not let cheaters escape punishment merely by claiming that there’s a problem with the formal legal code (regardless of whether that claim is correct).
I do not think you need to worry about blocking people from making up their own variations. My impression is that most hobbyist board gamers who would like to have house rules will go ahead use them no matter what you say on the matter. (This won’t stop people from clamoring for you to canonize their preferred rule, but I don’t think you can stop that by leaving rules unspecified, either.)
If you insist on doing this anyway, you should at least be clear about it in the document itself. You are bucking the cultural expectations of the board game hobbyist community, which expect games to be fully defined when we get them. People are not likely to infer that you intend them to make up their own details if you don’t spell that out.
I’m surprised you wouldn’t just assume I meant one space, given a lack of further details.
That was my highest-probability guess.
I do not like rulebooks that require me to guess what the rules are.
I also picked examples based on how glaring the absence of a rule seemed (and therefore how much evidence it gave that I was reading the wrong document), rather than based on how hard it was to guess the most likely answer. If I was more focused on omissions that are hard to guess, I might have asked “can 2 pawns occupy the same space at the same time?” instead.
Maybe I should move the mention of object pickup to the hunger card as well
If you intend to use this on more than one ability, I think it’s probably good to have object pickup rules in the rulebook, but there should be enough context that readers can slot the rule into their mental model of the game while reading the rulebook instead of leaving a dangling pointer that will only be resolved when they see the right card.
“Some abilities add objects to the map. Objects in your space can be picked up or dropped for free during your turn...”
You also probably need several more rules about objects, e.g. “Objects are carried by a particular pawn, and cannot teleport between the two pawns controlled by the same player. Stack the objects beneath the pawn to show they are being carried. Dropped objects remain in their space until someone picks them up. You can carry an unlimited number of objects at once. You can’t directly take an object that someone else is carrying.”
Also, your print-and-play files do not appear to include any components to represent objects. If you are expecting people to supply their own components for this, that ought to be called out in the rules (and you should say something about how many you need, of how many different kinds, etc.) In fact, it is standard practice to include a component list for a game—people usually skim right past it until suddenly they need it because they suspect they’re missing a piece or something.
(Though if this level of effort seems excessive for how often objects are actually used in the game, that might be a sign you should either use it more or get rid of it. Sometimes there’s a really cool ability that’s just not worth the complexity it introduces.)
This one gives me anguish. I don’t think formally defining nearby somewhere would make a better experience for most people and I also don’t want to say “on or adjacent to” 100 times.
Having a short description that will probably give people the right impression is great, but I think lots of players benefit from having some document they can check to resolve a confusion or disagreement if it comes up. I can’t remember a time I’ve played a game that had a glossary or a “longer descriptions of the abilities” section where I didn’t end up looking at least one thing up, and I can remember a lot of times when I wanted one and it wasn’t present.
Also, maybe try “within 1”. (Someone will still ask whether this means “on or adjacent” or “in the exact same space”, but I’d expect fewer people will need to ask compared to “nearby”.)
then when they go to a meetup or a con, anyone they meet will have a different version
No, that would actually be wonderful. We can learn from each other and compile our best findings.
It’s more of a problem when trying to talk about the game through the internet when you can’t see each other playing and notice the differences in others’ interpretations.
I guess the synthesis would be for me to be fully specific in the manual, then insert lots and lots of “but also try it this other way” sections all over the place, like chekhovs pathways in a metroidvania.
Objects are carried by a particular pawn, and cannot teleport between the two pawns controlled by the same player.
Oof, that’s a good thing to point out. Not all bodies can be stood on, so teleporting might actually be a better rule, especially given how interesting that is as a mechanic.
[failed line of thought, don’t read] Maybe, instead, the rule should just be that a piece can move any object in the same cell along with it when it moves. It may even be a good idea to include other players’ pieces in that. Hmm. No. This would incentivize the formation of large clumps of agents that could essentially move around the board unnaturally quickly, using similar principles to those caterpillar trails, and aside from that being too damned weird, it would overwhelm the capacity of the cells. I like the idea of pairs of allied agents being able to do this, though (analogizes one carrying the other while the other rests). And in the case of objects, it would still incentivize clumps.
“longer descriptions of the abilities”
I’d like that. That would be a good additional manual page, mostly generated.
then when they go to a meetup or a con, anyone they meet will have a different version
No, that would actually be wonderful. We can learn from each other and compile our best findings.
That’s...not the strategy I would choose for playtesting multiple versions of a game. Consider:
Testers aren’t familiar with the mainline version and don’t know how their version differs from it, so can’t explain what their test condition is or how their results differ
You don’t know how their version differs either, or even whether it differs, except by getting them to teach you their full rules.
There’s a high risk they will accidentally leave out important details of the rules—even professional rulebooks often have issues, and that’s not what you’ll be getting. So interpreting whatever feedback you get will be a significant issue.
You can’t guarantee that any particular version gets tested
You can’t exclude variants that you believe are not worth testing
You can’t control how much testing is devoted to each version
Many players may invent bad rules and then blame their bad experience on your game, or simply refuse to play at all if you’re going to force them to invent rules, so you end up with a smaller and less-appreciative playerbase overall
The only real advantage I see to this strategy is that it may result in substantially more testers than asking for volunteers. But it accomplishes that by functionally deceiving your players about the fact that they’re testing variants, which isn’t a policy I endorse, either on moral or pragmatic grounds.
Most of the people that you’ve tricked into testing for you will never actually deliver any benefits to you. Even among volunteers, only a small percentage of playtesters actually deliver notable feedback (perhaps a tenth, depending on how you recruit). Among people who wouldn’t have volunteered, I imagine the percentage will be much lower.
[failed line of thought, don’t read]
Maybe limit it to bringing 1 thing with you? But notice this permits “stealing” items from other players, since “being carried” is not a persistent state.
“longer descriptions of the abilities”
I’d like that. That would be a good additional manual page, mostly generated.
If you’re imagine having a computer program generate this, I’m not sure how that could work. The purpose is not merely to be verbose, but to act as a FAQ for each specific ability, hopefully providing a direct answer whatever question prompted them to look that ability up.
If you aren’t familiar with this practice, maybe take a look at the Dominion rulebook as an example.
That’s...not the strategy I would choose for playtesting multiple versions of a game. Consider
I think you misunderstood, I wouldn’t write the manual this way after publishing for a broad audience. It’s just fine for developers. But there are also some other reasons that stuff is less relevant:
It’s a game about choosing whatever rules make the most sense. Mainly setting laws, rather than game rules, but the mindset transfers.
Everyone has complete information, and players are generally cooperatively striving towards mutual understanding (rather than away from it), so everyone’s assumptions about the game rules are visible, if there’s a difference in interpretation, you’ll notice it in peoples’ choices and you’re usually going to want to bring it up.
Speaking as a developer, I would rather have a complete worked-out example as a baseline for my modifications than a box of loose parts.
I do not think that the designer mindset of unilaterally specifying neutral rules to provide a good experience for all players is especially similar to the negotiator mindset of trying to make the deal that will score you the most points.
I haven’t played Optimal Weave yet, but my player model predicts that a nontrivial fraction of players are going to try to trick each other during their first game. Also I don’t think any hidden info or trickery is required in order for rule disagreements to become an issue.
I should probably rewrite it, but the reason the rules document is the way it is is that I was writing it for developers (are you one btw) and so there were a lot of things I didn’t want to be prescriptive about, and I figured they could guess a lot of it as they approached their own understanding of how the game should be and how things fit together, and I want to encourage people to fully own their understanding of the reasons for the rules.
For that, writing in this way actually might be necessary to get people to ask “how should it be” instead of just taking my word as law and not really thinking about the underlying principles.
I’m surprised you wouldn’t just assume I meant one space, given a lack of further details.
In this case, the other rules are on the card backs. A lot of them are, which may be part of what’s going on here.
When someone gets a terrible hunger desire, it’s explained on the card that killing creates bodies and bodies can be carried. Object stuff isn’t needed before then. Maybe I should move the mention of object pickup to the hunger card as well, but I’m not sure there’ll always be room on that (I’m considering doing one with a micro deck to support placing cards in the world), and it’s possible that more objects, other than bodies, will be added to the game later.
This one gives me anguish. I don’t think formally defining nearby somewhere would make a better experience for most people and I also don’t want to say “on or adjacent to” 100 times.
Edit: I think a card symbology glossary would be a good move here.
I think this is a bad idea. Games are complex machines with many interlocking parts and they trade off between many goals; even an experienced developer can’t generally fill in gaps and expect things to work on the first try. This goes double for you because you are deliberately making an unusual game. Asking people to invent some of the rules is placing a pretty significant burden on them.
And if the designer fails to supply at least one example of a good rule, this makes me question whether they ever successfully found a good option themselves, and whether any possible rule could be filled in that would lead to a good result. (Imagine a blueprint for a perpetual motion machine with a box labeled “you can put whatever you want here.”)
Additionally, an interoperable standard makes it much easier for people to play with strangers. If every friend-group invents their own version, then when they go to a meetup or a con, anyone they meet will have a different version. An official version makes it easier to join a new group.
That’s without even getting into the psychological hangups people have about official rules, which are considerable. I think board games tap into human instincts about societal and ethical rules, and human instincts would like to pretend that there really is a correct rule somewhere in the Platonic realm, and maybe it’s unclear but it can’t just be missing and it’s certainly not up for grabs. I’ve seen people get pretty upset at the suggestion that there is no “right” rule for something because the designer simply never considered it, or that the version 2 of the rules is in some sense “a different game” from version 1. My pet theory is that this is an evolved security measure to not let cheaters escape punishment merely by claiming that there’s a problem with the formal legal code (regardless of whether that claim is correct).
I do not think you need to worry about blocking people from making up their own variations. My impression is that most hobbyist board gamers who would like to have house rules will go ahead use them no matter what you say on the matter. (This won’t stop people from clamoring for you to canonize their preferred rule, but I don’t think you can stop that by leaving rules unspecified, either.)
If you insist on doing this anyway, you should at least be clear about it in the document itself. You are bucking the cultural expectations of the board game hobbyist community, which expect games to be fully defined when we get them. People are not likely to infer that you intend them to make up their own details if you don’t spell that out.
That was my highest-probability guess.
I do not like rulebooks that require me to guess what the rules are.
I also picked examples based on how glaring the absence of a rule seemed (and therefore how much evidence it gave that I was reading the wrong document), rather than based on how hard it was to guess the most likely answer. If I was more focused on omissions that are hard to guess, I might have asked “can 2 pawns occupy the same space at the same time?” instead.
If you intend to use this on more than one ability, I think it’s probably good to have object pickup rules in the rulebook, but there should be enough context that readers can slot the rule into their mental model of the game while reading the rulebook instead of leaving a dangling pointer that will only be resolved when they see the right card.
“Some abilities add objects to the map. Objects in your space can be picked up or dropped for free during your turn...”
You also probably need several more rules about objects, e.g. “Objects are carried by a particular pawn, and cannot teleport between the two pawns controlled by the same player. Stack the objects beneath the pawn to show they are being carried. Dropped objects remain in their space until someone picks them up. You can carry an unlimited number of objects at once. You can’t directly take an object that someone else is carrying.”
Also, your print-and-play files do not appear to include any components to represent objects. If you are expecting people to supply their own components for this, that ought to be called out in the rules (and you should say something about how many you need, of how many different kinds, etc.) In fact, it is standard practice to include a component list for a game—people usually skim right past it until suddenly they need it because they suspect they’re missing a piece or something.
(Though if this level of effort seems excessive for how often objects are actually used in the game, that might be a sign you should either use it more or get rid of it. Sometimes there’s a really cool ability that’s just not worth the complexity it introduces.)
Having a short description that will probably give people the right impression is great, but I think lots of players benefit from having some document they can check to resolve a confusion or disagreement if it comes up. I can’t remember a time I’ve played a game that had a glossary or a “longer descriptions of the abilities” section where I didn’t end up looking at least one thing up, and I can remember a lot of times when I wanted one and it wasn’t present.
Also, maybe try “within 1”. (Someone will still ask whether this means “on or adjacent” or “in the exact same space”, but I’d expect fewer people will need to ask compared to “nearby”.)
No, that would actually be wonderful. We can learn from each other and compile our best findings.
It’s more of a problem when trying to talk about the game through the internet when you can’t see each other playing and notice the differences in others’ interpretations.
I guess the synthesis would be for me to be fully specific in the manual, then insert lots and lots of “but also try it this other way” sections all over the place, like chekhovs pathways in a metroidvania.
Oof, that’s a good thing to point out. Not all bodies can be stood on, so teleporting might actually be a better rule, especially given how interesting that is as a mechanic.
[failed line of thought, don’t read] Maybe, instead, the rule should just be that a piece can move any object in the same cell along with it when it moves. It may even be a good idea to include other players’ pieces in that. Hmm. No. This would incentivize the formation of large clumps of agents that could essentially move around the board unnaturally quickly, using similar principles to those caterpillar trails, and aside from that being too damned weird, it would overwhelm the capacity of the cells. I like the idea of pairs of allied agents being able to do this, though (analogizes one carrying the other while the other rests). And in the case of objects, it would still incentivize clumps.
I’d like that. That would be a good additional manual page, mostly generated.
That’s...not the strategy I would choose for playtesting multiple versions of a game. Consider:
Testers aren’t familiar with the mainline version and don’t know how their version differs from it, so can’t explain what their test condition is or how their results differ
You don’t know how their version differs either, or even whether it differs, except by getting them to teach you their full rules.
There’s a high risk they will accidentally leave out important details of the rules—even professional rulebooks often have issues, and that’s not what you’ll be getting. So interpreting whatever feedback you get will be a significant issue.
You can’t guarantee that any particular version gets tested
You can’t exclude variants that you believe are not worth testing
You can’t control how much testing is devoted to each version
Many players may invent bad rules and then blame their bad experience on your game, or simply refuse to play at all if you’re going to force them to invent rules, so you end up with a smaller and less-appreciative playerbase overall
The only real advantage I see to this strategy is that it may result in substantially more testers than asking for volunteers. But it accomplishes that by functionally deceiving your players about the fact that they’re testing variants, which isn’t a policy I endorse, either on moral or pragmatic grounds.
Most of the people that you’ve tricked into testing for you will never actually deliver any benefits to you. Even among volunteers, only a small percentage of playtesters actually deliver notable feedback (perhaps a tenth, depending on how you recruit). Among people who wouldn’t have volunteered, I imagine the percentage will be much lower.
Maybe limit it to bringing 1 thing with you? But notice this permits “stealing” items from other players, since “being carried” is not a persistent state.
If you’re imagine having a computer program generate this, I’m not sure how that could work. The purpose is not merely to be verbose, but to act as a FAQ for each specific ability, hopefully providing a direct answer whatever question prompted them to look that ability up.
If you aren’t familiar with this practice, maybe take a look at the Dominion rulebook as an example.
I think you misunderstood, I wouldn’t write the manual this way after publishing for a broad audience. It’s just fine for developers. But there are also some other reasons that stuff is less relevant:
It’s a game about choosing whatever rules make the most sense. Mainly setting laws, rather than game rules, but the mindset transfers.
Everyone has complete information, and players are generally cooperatively striving towards mutual understanding (rather than away from it), so everyone’s assumptions about the game rules are visible, if there’s a difference in interpretation, you’ll notice it in peoples’ choices and you’re usually going to want to bring it up.
Speaking as a developer, I would rather have a complete worked-out example as a baseline for my modifications than a box of loose parts.
I do not think that the designer mindset of unilaterally specifying neutral rules to provide a good experience for all players is especially similar to the negotiator mindset of trying to make the deal that will score you the most points.
I haven’t played Optimal Weave yet, but my player model predicts that a nontrivial fraction of players are going to try to trick each other during their first game. Also I don’t think any hidden info or trickery is required in order for rule disagreements to become an issue.