I kind of like Root's approach, just make three separate rulebooks. One quickstart guide, one "normal" rulebook, and one "law" type rulebook laying out everything in almost procedural style with clear and consistent definitions etc. Many games could benefit from that.
Most modern boardgames do something like that (although typically in a single book with multiple sections).
The standard seems to be to start with a setup/quick start guide that walks you through the initial setup and the in-order game loop.
Then have a reference section that goes through all of the specific mechanics (e.g., a deckbuilder might have "then play a card from your hand" in the quick start, and the reference section would go through the various cards available).
Then at the end is a FAQ, that is mostly just all of the rule lawyer stuff.
Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to. Nowadays, you almost always get some form of a cheat sheet card that explains the core game loop, and many rules will be encoded in some way on the game elements themselves.
Now that I think about it, technical writing classes should really take field trips to game stores. There is a lot of impressive that goes into communicating how to play that most people never notice.
> Most modern boardgames do something like that (although typically in a single book with multiple sections).
As a member of a boardgame club having played to approximately a hundred of less-than-two-years-old games[1] over the past year and a half, I can assure you most boardgames don't, even modern ones.
[1] yes, there are that many games. A few years back there were approximately six hundreds new games being released in a year, for the French market alone (granted it's one of the most dynamic), and I heard it more than doubled after Covid so I don't know where we're at right now.
> Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to
I wonder if those new players have thousands of sessions of play under their belt or if they are truly new players or with only a few games of experience.
I don't listen much to the explanation of a new game because there are usually too many rules to remember, they resemble parts of some other games (like learning Python when you know Ruby) and I ask questions when I'm playing and (sorry if somebody feels bad about this:) these are not chess or go or backgammon, I'm not expected to study to become good and play thousands of games of them, they are all casual games to me.
All I need to have a decent first game and not score last is identifying a way to score points and play along that line. If I play that game again I will do better (maybe.) If I don't play it anymore it doesn't matter if I invested my attention into its rules.
One war-game I played came with two rule books, which was incredibly helpful for learning to play - each player could read his own copy.
But single-page "QuickStart" rules for each player (which later serve as a reference) and a main rulebook can work well, also.
The problem with this is it can result in a bunch of "special cases" not being known about until later; IIRC we had this problem with Agricola and it wasn't until the fourth or fifth play through that we didn't identify a rule we had been mistaken about during play. That game's especially bad since it has so many possible interactions that could be A then B or B then A.
If you have fun isn't that the point. Ideally games should be a here are the simplified rules so you can have fun fast. Then here are the full rules so you can play a much more complex and fun game. Of course pulling that off is hard.
Agricola is pretty old. Many of the older euros that were translated to English are shocking. And the way information is conveyed is noticeably worse than a good modern euro.
The original Agricola rulebook is almost completely unusable and the only way to learn how to play back in the day was someone who already knew how to play teaching you - I presume in an unbroken oral tradition all the way back to Uwe Rosenberg.
In a typical wargame special case rules are numerous, but mostly expected and conforming to familiar design patterns (e.g. entering a map hexagon containing something special with a unit, depending on unit type and state, is going to cost some extra point of movement or end the move completely).
So they and can be looked up when needed (e.g. what units can move enough to cross this river this turn?) and promptly forgotten.
It is usually enough to study wargame rulebooks just enough to know general procedures and trust the simulation to be unsurprisingly realistic.
I have not encountered a wargame that shipped with two rulebooks in the box, but often the latest rulebook PDF is available as a free download, so when playing a large wargame we often have printed one copy for each player, or at least almost that many. It is always good to have a rulebook within reach.
I'm a little less than impressed by the presentation here. The idea that Divio is describing here is the Diataxis framework (https://diataxis.fr/), which "is the work of" (https://diataxis.fr/colophon/) Daniele Procida (https://vurt.eu/). Who, incidentally, is also giving the PyCon talk in the video on the page you linked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vKPhjcMZg). But I don't see anything resembling attribution for the ideas. They aren't just common industry knowledge or "received wisdom". (And the "quote" from David Laing at the top isn't really accomplishing anything, either.)
It drives me crazy personally, I think Arcs abandoned this for good reason. Root has a major rules sprawl issue IMO. Many rules are spread throughout the cards, the "Learning to Play" guide, the "Law of Root", the player mats, etc. I don't actually think you can really learn the game unless you have the board and player mats right in front of you. Wehrle's predilection for thematic names with clearer/plainer synonyms I think makes this hard as well.
People who praise the game by saying "the board teaches you how to play" are technically correct, but I think this glosses over how difficult it is to internalize turn structure before sitting down to play the game.
That being said, it's not the worst game I've ever had to learn. That dubious distinction probably belongs to Wehrle's John Company (scowling at you "Events In India" rules).
> Root has a major rules sprawl issue IMO. Many rules are spread throughout the cards, the "Learning to Play" guide, the "Law of Root", the player mats, etc.
Every rule AFAIK is in the Law of Root. So just refer to that. Once you've played once you should never look at the Learn to Play again. The player mats are player aids to remind you of the rules. The fact that rules are duplicated there is a plus, not a minus.
Funny that you mention Root. I recently played this game for the first time with three other SWE friends (also their first times), and we all found the multiple sources of truth, each seeming to make the assumption that you have already read the others and occasionally referring you to them, thoroughly baffling -- to the point where we started to make joking comparisons to the kind of software documentation that has an Overview, a Quick Start, a Tutorial, an Introduction, a Beginner's Guide, a How To page, a User's Guide, a Getting Started page, a Specification, a Reference Manual... Looking at you, Maven plugins.
Then again, maybe it was just that we were all a teensy bit drunk.
Non-games could also benefit from different books for different use cases.
I once bought some disk utility software because I had a bunch of files that had accidentally been deleted that I really needed to get back (they were not on backup yet because they were recently created) and was quite happy that in addition to the 200 page exhaustive manual there was also a small booklet whose cover said in big print something like "Read this first if you bought this because you are trying to recover a disk".
That booklet was placed so that it would be the first thing you would see when you opened the box and you'd have to remove it to get to the installation floppies.
I know that there used to be some oversights where things where missing from the Law (like how to distinguish immediate effects from permanent effects on cards based on whether the box is paper or stone) but all of them have been resolved by now.
I recall my favorite part of opening up a new Nintendo game was poring over the manual. I didn't actually want it for instructions. It was the lore and the pictures and the dreams of what I could do with the game that made it fun.
Now, people are so media saturated that they're begging to remove as much content as possible in order to just get the clearest bit of information. I can't help we've lost something in society when we're not really enjoying or having fun unless we get immediate and overwhelming pleasure triggers.
What era were you doing this in? I love looking at these old manuals but every era was different.
I think the decline is kinda obvious… the manual is an expense, most people don’t want to read it, and it’s better to make the game explain its own story and gameplay. 1980s manuals had walkthroughs and explained the story because that kind of functionality was difficult to put in software. Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
It’s wild to look at the Final Fantasy II (you know, FF4) manual from 1991. It has half the story laid out with maps of towns and dungeons, followed by tables of the items and abilities in the game. Meanwhile, you look at Xenoblade Chronicles 3 from 2022. XC3 is absurdly complicated by comparison and has a much larger story, but it is playable without a manual because the game explains how to play as you play it. Somewhere in the middle, in the 2000s, you have the middle option—manuals that give you a list of characters in the story and tell you what all the buttons do.
Archive.org is great for these old manuals.
Worth mentioning is how games like Legend of Zelda were not anticipated to be beatable by ordinary players without help (help beyond what the manual provided). Phantasy Star 2 is in a similar category and I think you were expected to have the strategy guide.
Also worth mentioning is games like SimLife, where the manual is a proper software manual. It also has those weird cartoons about a family playing around with a gene splicer.
Not OP, but I had a similar experience growing up in the '90s. StarCraft in '98 is probably the best example; the original manual is the only source with the backstory explaining how the humans in the game left earth in giant colony ships, got lost, and ended up colonizing the koprulu sector. Without that backstory, the game's story - and especially Brood War's story - are pretty hard to follow.
> Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
I was able to read the StarCraft manual on the bus to school, car rides, waiting rooms. If the info had been locked in the game itself, in some kind of sub-menu, I never would have read through it, because I was playing the game.
Manuals served another purpose in the 1980s: pirates rarely copied the manual with the game and so someone who bought the real game could learn how to play it while the pirates had a large collection of games that were no fun because without the manual they spent a lot of time trying different buttons just to see what worked - often they never did figure out the secret moves and so the game wasn't even winnable even though they could make progress and it seemed like they just needed to get better.
And then there was a period in the 1990s when the FMV intro had higher quality graphics than the rest of the game.
These situations just don't exist these days. Although, admittedly, some people do buy game books and lore books because they're well illustrated (illuminated?)
We've "lost something in society" because we don't want to be immersed in lore and pictures and dreams of what we could do while our friends sit patiently around the table waiting for us to look up if we can build a dairy barn in the farm flash step?
This is referencing a rule. I'm not sure I'm arguing against a clear reference, I like those. But I've certainly been at a table where we open the box, the host hasn't read the rules and frankly doesn't want to. I would hope you'd be excited about the board game, enjoy the book that comes with it, and then invite your friends over to play :-)
I think you may be romanticizing the past a bit here. I got a Nintendo when it came out too and I never did any of the things you've done. You may have just imagined everyone was behaving in the same way you were, when it's probably just as likely they behaved more like me.
I remember getting Ultima V as a kid and it came with this beautiful cloth map, some little game related physical artifacts, and a big lore book you could read to get the backstory and context. I read that thing cover to cover before embarking on that awesome game. It was really something special. They don’t make games like that anymore. Now it’s “Here, have a half-assed binary, delivered online, full of bugs (because we rushed it out without QA) that’s going to need a zero day patch just to work, and search the web if you want (fan-written) lore and immersion.”
I concede this may be true. First time I played D&D, I bought the rulebook and pored over it until I knew the rules and details -- and had a blast. Now, being a DM, no one reads the rules.
I loved being able to rent a game for weekend from our grocery store’s vhs department. I’d spend the rest of the trip home eagerly reading the guide while my mom shopped and I’d be so hyped to play the game by the time we got home.
It’s a good thing the games were plug and play in the console back then, I wouldn’t have had the patience to install and download a 3GB patch before starting
That mechanic is so creative. I love the gave but it's hard to describe what's so great about it to others without also revealing that brilliant mechanic which is really fun to encounter for the first time without expecting it.
As an avid board gamer, I think one of the biggest factors is page count. A big rule book makes the game feel less approachable. In the example provided at the bottom, the rewritten rulebook is ~50 pages. The original is 24. It doesn't matter how well it's written if it scares people off.
I find that many people are so afraid of reading game rules that they'd rather watch 15-30m how to play videos. It's telling of the industry that these videos are typically better learning resources than the rulebooks themselves.
My favorite rulebooks have 1-page rule references at the back or scannable columns on each page that summarize the main text.
As someone who enjoys technical documentation writing, I think board game rulebook writing would be a rewarding experience. Not exactly sure how to get into that field though...
(I have yet to read this in full, but I'm excited to dig in)
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.
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.
>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.).
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.
I personally dislike how-to-play videos. If you blink and miss something, hunting around a video is much worse than scanning a rulebook. I also do not have the patience to sit there for 10-15 minutes.
> If you blink and miss something, hunting around a video is much worse than scanning a rulebook.
Not only that, but very nearly every one of them has rules errors. There is exactly one YouTuber (from Watch It Played) who consistently puts out rules-error-free videos. Any and all other video playthroughs, i take with a huge grain of salt.
I really like a 5 minute how-to-play before either reading the rules, or having them explained to me. It gives me all the context and makes the other information sit much better.
I re-write rules for myself for games where I need a better teaching "script". For example, the Keyper rulebook was terrible, but the rules themselves were not. I wrote myself a summary so I could re-teach the game if needed.
Yes! Anything I'm serious about learning, I (re)write the documentation as I go. Haven't tried this with board games yet, but it actually sounds kind of fun.
For me, at least, there is no rulebook or textbook or docs page that is so great that I can learn about something just by reading about it. Unless I can mess with it (even just by writing my own text about it), I will never internalize it.
I mostly agree, but it depends on "density". If there's lots of photos and diagrams that both makes the page count larger, and helps ease it. You can have a super dense text only book that's 24 pages, but hard to parse because there's no images/diagrams, etc... Layout also matters, as does spacing.
I looked at Twilight Struggle and was terrified at how thick the book was, but it's really more a reference guide, and each step is laid out in detail, so there were hardly any questions. And if I had them they were easy to find. It's intimidating at first, but in terms of ease? It actually worked really well. But for the most part, yes. Big thick tomes that are full of overly flavored text and lack of examples/references are the worst. I really like when there are player cheatsheets that help explain the flow of the game and common elements to help reduce downtime/asking the "leader"/teacher for info
>A big rule book makes the game feel less approachable. In the example provided at the bottom, the rewritten rulebook is ~50 pages. The original is 24. It doesn't matter how well it's written if it scares people off.
I get the sense from the comment section many others here are reacting to the article title and sharing their thoughts on board game rulebooks generally, rather than critiquing the article.
Which is to say, I think you're right. The linked PDF is 150 pages and I think that's discouraged many people from trying to consider the author's ideas. Even though they're presented in a way that seems intended to benefit from (and demonstrate) those very ideas and make the material easier to read, the sheer volume discourages many readers before the first word.
There was a part earlier where Johnson argues:
> That's about 60 years of rulebook design. The 2023 printing of Acquire's rulebook is more readable than any previous printing's rulebook. But each printing of Acquire's rulebook has the same basic structure. The 1960s printing had sections for: objective of the game, game terms, setup, play (playing tiles, buying stock, merging chains), end of the game, and edge cases. The 2023 printing has more detailed rules, more example images, and more tips for new players, but the order and presentation of rules is roughly the same.
... but the 2023 printing apparently runs to 16 half-size pages, where the original rules fit on the underside of the box top. (And from the photo, it appears to make some use of bullet-point lists, too.) And this is apparently a relatively light ruleset compared to the others discussed in the article.
I agree it's intimidating. I think the way to counter that is good player aids. If you have a really well designed reference in front of each player, then the teach is often "see that second line, well this is how that works". Also the teacher should read the rules ahead of time, so they can can summarize or go in more details depending on the comprehension of players.
Those videos often gloss over a lot of specific details (e.g. round-up or round-down) and thats fine to gloss over in teaching also. If the first game runs smooth and gives the game experience, they're more likely to play again than if you have to stop and dig through reference multiple times. You can always look it up after so you do the second game more correctly.
> As someone who enjoys technical documentation writing, I think board game rulebook writing would be a rewarding experience. Not exactly sure how to get into that field though...
Do what the author did and start by writing a new rule book for an existing game. You can upload it to BGG and get feedback from players. After doing a few of those, they got contacted by a designer to write one for a brand new game.
> I find that many people are so afraid of reading game rules that they'd rather watch 15-30m how to play videos.
I find this goes for everything. People are so afraid of reading they'll watch a 10 minute video for something they could've read in 5. Trouble is reading is something you need to practice and ability will fade away when not used.
For medium/heavy-complexity games, it's essential to have a glossary (preferably with pictures), either/both at the start/end of the rulebook or the complete reference. And the glossary should have (clickable) section/page references for where to read more about a concept (and the glossary should be complete (but not nitpicking or pedantic), which sounds self-evident yet is not the case a shocking amount of the time). And the glossary should also be referenced by/ have consistent terminology with the quickstart/reference card.
It's not that I'm "afraid" of reading game rules, just that I know from lots of experience how rare it is for a (8-25pp) manual to balance explaining the minimal set of mechanics in a fast, comprehensible, logical order, also giving a feel for typical gameplay (even just 2P), and toss in some basic remarks about strategies and tips. Many times my friends and I have invested 1-3hrs in learning something, only to find the gameplay has gotchas by rewarding/punishing quirky things, or is simply broken. Or we have to go to BoardGameArena.com to find basic errata/clarifications/houserules for ambiguity, or the designer's own semi-official clarifications/ version 1.1. So, one guerrilla way to estimate how good/bad the official rulebook is to count the number of (and frustration level in) clarification threads on BGA, or whether an updated rulebook is downloadable, or how many unofficial fan cheatsheets or guides there are on BGA.
One infamous example was the 2010 version of 'Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game' (complexity 3.17/5, rating 7.3) where the physical boardgame implementation was so complex as to be unplayable (6-12+ hrs for a 2P game, I was told); it made the case why the computer version was better for implementing all the bookkeeping; my friend showed me multiple ringbound manuals of gameplay and reference guide and I simply said no (even though I loved the software versions). [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/77130/sid-meiers-civiliz...]
(Then they overreacted too far in the opposite direction with 'Civilization: A New Dawn' (2017) which simplified tech, combat, terrain way too much, down to 5 values each; it gave a huge advantage once you knew which civilizations were OP and which techs sounded useful but were a productivity trap and worth skipping. Like, Aztecs with nuclear weapons (special ability is to reuse that attack every other turn)).[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233247/civilization-a-ne...]
It's so classic that board game adaptations of computer games are bookkeeping extravaganzas. I don't understand why people want to "replicate the computer game experience" in a board game, why not just play the computer game then? There are so many games that play to board games' strengths, instead of trying to be cut down computer games.
I've only read like 20 pages but this is already hitting the nail on the head for me. I've tried many times to play specific games with friends on Tabletop Simulator, but more often than not we bounce off because it's too tedious to read rulebooks.
I get that game designers want the player to understand all of the rules in a game but it quickly turns into its own game of trying to decipher a huge tome to understand how this game works. We just want to play the game as soon as possible and learn as we go, but tons of rulebooks try to teach you every single mechanic before you move a piece on the board.
My biggest pet peeve with rulebooks by far is how many rulebooks feel like they're written out of order (which is touched on in the book above). I would get to parts that should be simple like moving a character or something similar, but there would be ten asterisks to how it works, each explained in different parts of the book.
Fake example: "Here's the movement phase, where you can move your character! Character movement is determined by your weight, refer to the weight class your character is currently in." Meanwhile, weight classes are explained 30 pages later. Now you're expected to either memorize everything, or bounce around flipping pages left and right in order to go step by step...
I think there's an understated component here that many games are built off of your knowledge of other games, so at one point the rulebook is there explaining stuff but omits a lot.
But then you play the game and there's the right kind of symbology explaining the rules anyways! There are so many little details on boards of modern games that guide the rules. Doesn't solve tiny parts, but really you gotta figure it out.
I think rulebooks can be way better, but at the same time I think rulebooks are not meant for players, but for whoever is going to teach the game. And that person should sit there and figure it out way before the game starts.
I've wanted a standard rulebook format for ages. I should be able to intuitively flip to the win conditions page because it's always in the same place, for example.
You shouldn't have to "flip to" the win conditions. Historically they were among the first thing written in the rules (I was that weird kid who had actually read the rules for Monopoly, and could tell you that your "free parking" setup was BS, and explain how mortgaging is supposed to work...): in a section titled "Object of the Game" (sometimes in all caps).
Tagentially, I've been working on how to best to explain Destiny raid mechanics to new players.
Background: Destiny 2 is a co-op multiplayer FPS, and its pinnacle activity is 6-player raids, which requires players to combine fast-paced FPS gunplay, split-second reaction to mechanics, and coordination and communication with other players. This can be a daunting and overwhelming challenge for players new to the raid, even if they already are experienced in FPS gameplay.
Challenge: explain to a player, familiar with Destiny gameplay but new to the raid, the mechanics of an "encounter" in 5-15 minutes, live. It must be as concise as possible so as not to confuse or overwhelm them, and not stretch the patience of the other players already familiar with the encounter.
Too often I've see players start from the immediate aspects, working forwards towards the later/broader aspects of the encounter, but I find that in the firehose of information, by the time the explanation is complete, the player has forgotten the first, immediately important details: "wait, tell me again what am I supposed to shoot first?"
So the approach I've been experimenting with is to work backwards from the goal of the encounter, so as to finish with the most immediate, tactically important information, so it's freshest in their memory. I don't yet have enough data points to conclude whether this is a better approach ;)
In any case, I'm just barely wading into the immense topic that people have spent decades, careers, and PhDs on: teaching, but it is fascinating the breadth of choices one has in how to approach an explanation.
(I also play a fair bit of board games, and learning a new board game is the primary obstacle of adoption, so I really appreciate the OP author's points)
I personally prefer to learn it from the front. I only teach the very first phase and tell the group to expect to wipe after the transition.
If there are key enemies to shoot or whatever I will send a screenshot into discord because the game has no good way to mark targets besides shooting them.
The main reason I like this method is because trying to do the whole fight in one go is just too much to infodump on someone. By the time they are ready for the phase 2 info, they will have enough confidence in the p1 strategy that you dont have to worry about pushing any knowledge out of their active memory.
I was also the raid leader for my WoW guild so the method does scale. You do need people who are able to learn from their mistakes though... Some just never figure out to move out of the fire.
My point is that explaining d2 raid mechanics gave me the chance to iterate on teaching in a targeted, globally understood (so there's a benchmark to compare against), and immediately actionable setting, which allowed me to practice these teaching essentials:
1. Be Concise! More information is not better, in fact it'll just overwhelm your students
1.a. Some details can be skipped entirely, until they become relevant
2. Repeat The Essentials! Repetition helps memorization, and highlights what's important. Some aspects are more important than others.
3. Visual and practical examples a essential! It's almost entirely useless to explain a subject without context or area to experiment in. Polite nods are your best outcome.
3.a. counter-example, the infamous "sudoers" manpage, so bad there's https://m.xkcd.com/1343/ about it. Start with examples, then generalize, not the opposite!
You may notice some contradiction between points 1 and 2. Yes! Finding the right balance is an art.
The challenge for ADHD geeks like me is to avoid the "train-of-thought" infodumping approach, and filtering for what's really the most relevant.
Something i like to do on top of this is separating the goals from the actions. Explain what, not how, we are trying to accomplish at a big picture level. Then, give concise, actionable instructions for how to accomplish the goal.
I very much dislike guides that combine goals and actions in one large, linear instruction set. As soon as there is any deviation, you don't have the high level knowledge to adapt. Sure, I'm supposed to stand on this plate and shoot these 3 things when you say so, but why? Someone died, now the timings are all off. How do I adapt?
Summary: For me learning by doing with good callouts and short, high point briefing before worked great. I also usually use a similar style of prompting people to do things when I am teaching people IT stuff instead of doing it for them or only talking about it (family tech support, might be a chaotic raid, but usually less twitchy /s).
As a datapoint in a similar situation, I played in a guild in Lost Ark that was quite competitive (more than I was). This game has mechanic heavy raids, but I do not know how they compare to Destiny 2. I went into early raids essentially blind and learned mostly by doing and listening to good calls during it.
A few minutes before we went in, and during the straightforward way to the bosses, someone familiar with the mechanics explained the general idea, e.g. "there is an instant kill in all phases, in the first 2 you need to stand on the whitish spots, in the 3rd phase on the reddish spots". During the actual encounters, and before the switch of mechanics, they would call out in short what to do, e.g. "stand in red" or just "red".
I personally liked this way. It gave me a rough idea what to expect and refreshed my memory enough to not screw up in the heat of the moment. The explanation itself was also quite short, because we didn't go through the play by play, only covering the important stuff and relying on in the moment callouts. Plus, some briefing happened during the run to the boss. This method might only work with a somewhat competent/disciplined group. We played like this as a guild with good raid leaders and during crunch time we had good comms discipline. In addition we went into training raids with inexperienced players, with the expectation that we might not make it, but still try our best, and usually won. There also were more or less fixed raid teams that grinded these bosses without any explanation, because everyone had done it multiple times already.
I played another game with lightly mechanics based bosses and I, or someone else, explained in about 3 chat messages what to do when we went in with randoms. It was simple enough "I do X, shoot adds when I do X, if I die, do Y". The experienced players took care of the harder/mechanics parts, everyone else covered the easy parts. If you have a semi-fixed group for this, everyone learns all mechanics at some point by observing.
When I teach people how to play a game, I usually omit several of the rules upfront to help people grok the goal faster. For example when teaching Texas Hold'em, we might play all the way to the river with all cards face up and no betting. Then we'll play a round with up-front betting keeping our hole cards private. Finally, we play the game "correctly" with turn-by-turn betting.
I'm surprised more board games don't include a "first game" playthrough guide to slowly introduce mechanics. This is extremely common in video games.
This is covered by the article. A board game might take 4 people and 2 hours to play. If your three friends didn't have fun with a board game the first time, they probably won't want to play again, and so you won't be able to play again either. Therefore there is a strong drive among boardgamers to play the "full" game the first time, because there might not be a second time.
It also adds extra difficulty to design a game that even has a simple version that is fun to play. Take your Texas Hold'em example, imagine it takes 2 hours to play one game. If you start with a version that has all cards face-up and no betting, people would conclude that Texas Hold'em is a supremely boring game, and wouldn't bother to try the full Texas Hold'em experience!
I've seen people teach by playing the open-face (or otherwise simplified version) of a single turn as a way to give an overview of core mechanics.
Naturally, this works better if the 2 hour game consists of dozens of 5 minute turns rather than a few half-hour ones.
If you show one hand of Texas Hold'em, and don't actually play it, but instead talk through what players might be thinking at various points, then you not only cover the mechanics, but sell the game (through the rhetorical device of dramatic irony: you emphasize that the players don't have complete information, and may try to mislead each other, and may come to wrong conclusions even without such deceit, and of course nobody knows what will come on the river...). But of course, it's difficult to disentangle that from a strategy discussion.
"First game" tutorials in rulebooks are awesome. Space Alert has an incredibly good tutorial system built in, where you play through something like 7 or 8 games, adding a few new rules each time.
Sleeping Gods also has a bit of a tutorial/quick start that works quite well.
I also, when playing a totally new game that no one has played, state up front that we're pretty much going to wing it for a few turns and after that we can see if we want to keep playing or start over.
Start over is often better, and it lets people not worry about getting into an hour-long game where they badly misplayed the first few turns.
The Farming Game rulebook[1] authors must have taken this list as a "how to" guide because it is by far the worst I have ever encountered. They intermix rules with some narrative meaning one has to parse a lot of words to extract which ones are relevant to getting started with the game and what actions are legal during play. It'd be like if those infamous recipe blogs intermingled the SEO content in between baking instruction steps
Galaxy Trucker takes this one step further. The first half of the narrative includes only partial explanations of most rules, with the missing details filled in later (still in narrative form), so you have to refer to two locations for any given rule. It makes for a decent tutorial, but it's a terrible reference.
Reminds me of competitive programming, a la Codeforces or IOI, where you solve incredibly challenging algorithmic problems that are wrapped in some silly story about a cow in a garden or something. (In my opinion, that is part of the challenge and fun!)
This is awesome! I don't know your goals with this, but maybe opening the rule markdown files through GitHub to crowd source info would allow you to reduce the hard work of writing the rules.
It comes with the (possibly harder) hard work of managing an open source project though.
My first thought is dedicating an hour or two a month to reviewing, merging, and deploying, but not sure if that'd be accurate.
Already done. There’s a link on the homepage to the GitHub, and you can just add a new markdown file in the rules folder. It auto deploys on merge to master.
Readit News
The standard seems to be to start with a setup/quick start guide that walks you through the initial setup and the in-order game loop.
Then have a reference section that goes through all of the specific mechanics (e.g., a deckbuilder might have "then play a card from your hand" in the quick start, and the reference section would go through the various cards available).
Then at the end is a FAQ, that is mostly just all of the rule lawyer stuff.
Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to. Nowadays, you almost always get some form of a cheat sheet card that explains the core game loop, and many rules will be encoded in some way on the game elements themselves.
Now that I think about it, technical writing classes should really take field trips to game stores. There is a lot of impressive that goes into communicating how to play that most people never notice.
As a member of a boardgame club having played to approximately a hundred of less-than-two-years-old games[1] over the past year and a half, I can assure you most boardgames don't, even modern ones.
[1] yes, there are that many games. A few years back there were approximately six hundreds new games being released in a year, for the French market alone (granted it's one of the most dynamic), and I heard it more than doubled after Covid so I don't know where we're at right now.
I wonder if those new players have thousands of sessions of play under their belt or if they are truly new players or with only a few games of experience.
I don't listen much to the explanation of a new game because there are usually too many rules to remember, they resemble parts of some other games (like learning Python when you know Ruby) and I ask questions when I'm playing and (sorry if somebody feels bad about this:) these are not chess or go or backgammon, I'm not expected to study to become good and play thousands of games of them, they are all casual games to me.
All I need to have a decent first game and not score last is identifying a way to score points and play along that line. If I play that game again I will do better (maybe.) If I don't play it anymore it doesn't matter if I invested my attention into its rules.
Good idea
I bought two of the Fate books (first the "toolkit" book, then the "core system" book) not fully understanding the differences.
But single-page "QuickStart" rules for each player (which later serve as a reference) and a main rulebook can work well, also.
The problem with this is it can result in a bunch of "special cases" not being known about until later; IIRC we had this problem with Agricola and it wasn't until the fourth or fifth play through that we didn't identify a rule we had been mistaken about during play. That game's especially bad since it has so many possible interactions that could be A then B or B then A.
More recent Agricola rule books are much better.
People who praise the game by saying "the board teaches you how to play" are technically correct, but I think this glosses over how difficult it is to internalize turn structure before sitting down to play the game.
That being said, it's not the worst game I've ever had to learn. That dubious distinction probably belongs to Wehrle's John Company (scowling at you "Events In India" rules).
Every rule AFAIK is in the Law of Root. So just refer to that. Once you've played once you should never look at the Learn to Play again. The player mats are player aids to remind you of the rules. The fact that rules are duplicated there is a plus, not a minus.
[1]: https://www.onepagerules.com/
Then again, maybe it was just that we were all a teensy bit drunk.
I once bought some disk utility software because I had a bunch of files that had accidentally been deleted that I really needed to get back (they were not on backup yet because they were recently created) and was quite happy that in addition to the 200 page exhaustive manual there was also a small booklet whose cover said in big print something like "Read this first if you bought this because you are trying to recover a disk".
That booklet was placed so that it would be the first thing you would see when you opened the box and you'd have to remove it to get to the installation floppies.
https://ledergames.com/pages/resources
I know that there used to be some oversights where things where missing from the Law (like how to distinguish immediate effects from permanent effects on cards based on whether the box is paper or stone) but all of them have been resolved by now.
https://www.catan.com/sites/default/files/2021-06/catan_base...
And the "basic" game was pretty damned complex to start with.
Now, people are so media saturated that they're begging to remove as much content as possible in order to just get the clearest bit of information. I can't help we've lost something in society when we're not really enjoying or having fun unless we get immediate and overwhelming pleasure triggers.
I think the decline is kinda obvious… the manual is an expense, most people don’t want to read it, and it’s better to make the game explain its own story and gameplay. 1980s manuals had walkthroughs and explained the story because that kind of functionality was difficult to put in software. Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
It’s wild to look at the Final Fantasy II (you know, FF4) manual from 1991. It has half the story laid out with maps of towns and dungeons, followed by tables of the items and abilities in the game. Meanwhile, you look at Xenoblade Chronicles 3 from 2022. XC3 is absurdly complicated by comparison and has a much larger story, but it is playable without a manual because the game explains how to play as you play it. Somewhere in the middle, in the 2000s, you have the middle option—manuals that give you a list of characters in the story and tell you what all the buttons do.
Archive.org is great for these old manuals.
Worth mentioning is how games like Legend of Zelda were not anticipated to be beatable by ordinary players without help (help beyond what the manual provided). Phantasy Star 2 is in a similar category and I think you were expected to have the strategy guide.
Also worth mentioning is games like SimLife, where the manual is a proper software manual. It also has those weird cartoons about a family playing around with a gene splicer.
> Today, games frequently have catalogs and encyclopedias you can access in-game, extensive cutscenes that give you the story, and tutorials for every important game mechanic.
I was able to read the StarCraft manual on the bus to school, car rides, waiting rooms. If the info had been locked in the game itself, in some kind of sub-menu, I never would have read through it, because I was playing the game.
"The family that transmogrifies together eats flies together!"
Also, the box art and booklet typically had much higher quality than the game. As a single example, look at Mega Man: https://retrovolve.com/an-illustrated-history-of-mega-man-bo...
And then there was a period in the 1990s when the FMV intro had higher quality graphics than the rest of the game.
These situations just don't exist these days. Although, admittedly, some people do buy game books and lore books because they're well illustrated (illuminated?)
It’s a good thing the games were plug and play in the console back then, I wouldn’t have had the patience to install and download a 3GB patch before starting
Have you by chance played Tunic? If not, there is a mechanic you may be particularly interested in. :)
I find that many people are so afraid of reading game rules that they'd rather watch 15-30m how to play videos. It's telling of the industry that these videos are typically better learning resources than the rulebooks themselves.
My favorite rulebooks have 1-page rule references at the back or scannable columns on each page that summarize the main text.
As someone who enjoys technical documentation writing, I think board game rulebook writing would be a rewarding experience. Not exactly sure how to get into that field though...
(I have yet to read this in full, but I'm excited to dig in)
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.
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.).
Not only that, but very nearly every one of them has rules errors. There is exactly one YouTuber (from Watch It Played) who consistently puts out rules-error-free videos. Any and all other video playthroughs, i take with a huge grain of salt.
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/269820/keyper-quick-rules...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/212516/keyper
And Smartphone, Inc, because the rulebook was bad for looking things up quickly:
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2979178/some-rules-notes-i-...
For me, at least, there is no rulebook or textbook or docs page that is so great that I can learn about something just by reading about it. Unless I can mess with it (even just by writing my own text about it), I will never internalize it.
I looked at Twilight Struggle and was terrified at how thick the book was, but it's really more a reference guide, and each step is laid out in detail, so there were hardly any questions. And if I had them they were easy to find. It's intimidating at first, but in terms of ease? It actually worked really well. But for the most part, yes. Big thick tomes that are full of overly flavored text and lack of examples/references are the worst. I really like when there are player cheatsheets that help explain the flow of the game and common elements to help reduce downtime/asking the "leader"/teacher for info
I get the sense from the comment section many others here are reacting to the article title and sharing their thoughts on board game rulebooks generally, rather than critiquing the article.
Which is to say, I think you're right. The linked PDF is 150 pages and I think that's discouraged many people from trying to consider the author's ideas. Even though they're presented in a way that seems intended to benefit from (and demonstrate) those very ideas and make the material easier to read, the sheer volume discourages many readers before the first word.
There was a part earlier where Johnson argues:
> That's about 60 years of rulebook design. The 2023 printing of Acquire's rulebook is more readable than any previous printing's rulebook. But each printing of Acquire's rulebook has the same basic structure. The 1960s printing had sections for: objective of the game, game terms, setup, play (playing tiles, buying stock, merging chains), end of the game, and edge cases. The 2023 printing has more detailed rules, more example images, and more tips for new players, but the order and presentation of rules is roughly the same.
... but the 2023 printing apparently runs to 16 half-size pages, where the original rules fit on the underside of the box top. (And from the photo, it appears to make some use of bullet-point lists, too.) And this is apparently a relatively light ruleset compared to the others discussed in the article.
Surely there's some compromise to be made here.
Those videos often gloss over a lot of specific details (e.g. round-up or round-down) and thats fine to gloss over in teaching also. If the first game runs smooth and gives the game experience, they're more likely to play again than if you have to stop and dig through reference multiple times. You can always look it up after so you do the second game more correctly.
Do what the author did and start by writing a new rule book for an existing game. You can upload it to BGG and get feedback from players. After doing a few of those, they got contacted by a designer to write one for a brand new game.
I find this goes for everything. People are so afraid of reading they'll watch a 10 minute video for something they could've read in 5. Trouble is reading is something you need to practice and ability will fade away when not used.
It's not that I'm "afraid" of reading game rules, just that I know from lots of experience how rare it is for a (8-25pp) manual to balance explaining the minimal set of mechanics in a fast, comprehensible, logical order, also giving a feel for typical gameplay (even just 2P), and toss in some basic remarks about strategies and tips. Many times my friends and I have invested 1-3hrs in learning something, only to find the gameplay has gotchas by rewarding/punishing quirky things, or is simply broken. Or we have to go to BoardGameArena.com to find basic errata/clarifications/houserules for ambiguity, or the designer's own semi-official clarifications/ version 1.1. So, one guerrilla way to estimate how good/bad the official rulebook is to count the number of (and frustration level in) clarification threads on BGA, or whether an updated rulebook is downloadable, or how many unofficial fan cheatsheets or guides there are on BGA.
One infamous example was the 2010 version of 'Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game' (complexity 3.17/5, rating 7.3) where the physical boardgame implementation was so complex as to be unplayable (6-12+ hrs for a 2P game, I was told); it made the case why the computer version was better for implementing all the bookkeeping; my friend showed me multiple ringbound manuals of gameplay and reference guide and I simply said no (even though I loved the software versions). [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/77130/sid-meiers-civiliz...]
(Then they overreacted too far in the opposite direction with 'Civilization: A New Dawn' (2017) which simplified tech, combat, terrain way too much, down to 5 values each; it gave a huge advantage once you knew which civilizations were OP and which techs sounded useful but were a productivity trap and worth skipping. Like, Aztecs with nuclear weapons (special ability is to reuse that attack every other turn)).[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233247/civilization-a-ne...]
I get that game designers want the player to understand all of the rules in a game but it quickly turns into its own game of trying to decipher a huge tome to understand how this game works. We just want to play the game as soon as possible and learn as we go, but tons of rulebooks try to teach you every single mechanic before you move a piece on the board.
My biggest pet peeve with rulebooks by far is how many rulebooks feel like they're written out of order (which is touched on in the book above). I would get to parts that should be simple like moving a character or something similar, but there would be ten asterisks to how it works, each explained in different parts of the book.
Fake example: "Here's the movement phase, where you can move your character! Character movement is determined by your weight, refer to the weight class your character is currently in." Meanwhile, weight classes are explained 30 pages later. Now you're expected to either memorize everything, or bounce around flipping pages left and right in order to go step by step...
But then you play the game and there's the right kind of symbology explaining the rules anyways! There are so many little details on boards of modern games that guide the rules. Doesn't solve tiny parts, but really you gotta figure it out.
I think rulebooks can be way better, but at the same time I think rulebooks are not meant for players, but for whoever is going to teach the game. And that person should sit there and figure it out way before the game starts.
Background: Destiny 2 is a co-op multiplayer FPS, and its pinnacle activity is 6-player raids, which requires players to combine fast-paced FPS gunplay, split-second reaction to mechanics, and coordination and communication with other players. This can be a daunting and overwhelming challenge for players new to the raid, even if they already are experienced in FPS gameplay.
Challenge: explain to a player, familiar with Destiny gameplay but new to the raid, the mechanics of an "encounter" in 5-15 minutes, live. It must be as concise as possible so as not to confuse or overwhelm them, and not stretch the patience of the other players already familiar with the encounter.
Too often I've see players start from the immediate aspects, working forwards towards the later/broader aspects of the encounter, but I find that in the firehose of information, by the time the explanation is complete, the player has forgotten the first, immediately important details: "wait, tell me again what am I supposed to shoot first?"
So the approach I've been experimenting with is to work backwards from the goal of the encounter, so as to finish with the most immediate, tactically important information, so it's freshest in their memory. I don't yet have enough data points to conclude whether this is a better approach ;)
In any case, I'm just barely wading into the immense topic that people have spent decades, careers, and PhDs on: teaching, but it is fascinating the breadth of choices one has in how to approach an explanation.
(I also play a fair bit of board games, and learning a new board game is the primary obstacle of adoption, so I really appreciate the OP author's points)
If there are key enemies to shoot or whatever I will send a screenshot into discord because the game has no good way to mark targets besides shooting them.
The main reason I like this method is because trying to do the whole fight in one go is just too much to infodump on someone. By the time they are ready for the phase 2 info, they will have enough confidence in the p1 strategy that you dont have to worry about pushing any knowledge out of their active memory.
I was also the raid leader for my WoW guild so the method does scale. You do need people who are able to learn from their mistakes though... Some just never figure out to move out of the fire.
It's such a shame the mobile version is getting pings before desktop
1. Be Concise! More information is not better, in fact it'll just overwhelm your students
1.a. Some details can be skipped entirely, until they become relevant
2. Repeat The Essentials! Repetition helps memorization, and highlights what's important. Some aspects are more important than others.
3. Visual and practical examples a essential! It's almost entirely useless to explain a subject without context or area to experiment in. Polite nods are your best outcome.
3.a. counter-example, the infamous "sudoers" manpage, so bad there's https://m.xkcd.com/1343/ about it. Start with examples, then generalize, not the opposite!
You may notice some contradiction between points 1 and 2. Yes! Finding the right balance is an art.
The challenge for ADHD geeks like me is to avoid the "train-of-thought" infodumping approach, and filtering for what's really the most relevant.
I very much dislike guides that combine goals and actions in one large, linear instruction set. As soon as there is any deviation, you don't have the high level knowledge to adapt. Sure, I'm supposed to stand on this plate and shoot these 3 things when you say so, but why? Someone died, now the timings are all off. How do I adapt?
As a datapoint in a similar situation, I played in a guild in Lost Ark that was quite competitive (more than I was). This game has mechanic heavy raids, but I do not know how they compare to Destiny 2. I went into early raids essentially blind and learned mostly by doing and listening to good calls during it.
A few minutes before we went in, and during the straightforward way to the bosses, someone familiar with the mechanics explained the general idea, e.g. "there is an instant kill in all phases, in the first 2 you need to stand on the whitish spots, in the 3rd phase on the reddish spots". During the actual encounters, and before the switch of mechanics, they would call out in short what to do, e.g. "stand in red" or just "red".
I personally liked this way. It gave me a rough idea what to expect and refreshed my memory enough to not screw up in the heat of the moment. The explanation itself was also quite short, because we didn't go through the play by play, only covering the important stuff and relying on in the moment callouts. Plus, some briefing happened during the run to the boss. This method might only work with a somewhat competent/disciplined group. We played like this as a guild with good raid leaders and during crunch time we had good comms discipline. In addition we went into training raids with inexperienced players, with the expectation that we might not make it, but still try our best, and usually won. There also were more or less fixed raid teams that grinded these bosses without any explanation, because everyone had done it multiple times already.
I played another game with lightly mechanics based bosses and I, or someone else, explained in about 3 chat messages what to do when we went in with randoms. It was simple enough "I do X, shoot adds when I do X, if I die, do Y". The experienced players took care of the harder/mechanics parts, everyone else covered the easy parts. If you have a semi-fixed group for this, everyone learns all mechanics at some point by observing.
Edit: Typo
I'm surprised more board games don't include a "first game" playthrough guide to slowly introduce mechanics. This is extremely common in video games.
It also adds extra difficulty to design a game that even has a simple version that is fun to play. Take your Texas Hold'em example, imagine it takes 2 hours to play one game. If you start with a version that has all cards face-up and no betting, people would conclude that Texas Hold'em is a supremely boring game, and wouldn't bother to try the full Texas Hold'em experience!
Naturally, this works better if the 2 hour game consists of dozens of 5 minute turns rather than a few half-hour ones.
If you show one hand of Texas Hold'em, and don't actually play it, but instead talk through what players might be thinking at various points, then you not only cover the mechanics, but sell the game (through the rhetorical device of dramatic irony: you emphasize that the players don't have complete information, and may try to mislead each other, and may come to wrong conclusions even without such deceit, and of course nobody knows what will come on the river...). But of course, it's difficult to disentangle that from a strategy discussion.
Sleeping Gods also has a bit of a tutorial/quick start that works quite well.
There should definitely be more of it.
A Python language/environment/progression that slowly requires the learner to understand more actual Python rules.
I also, when playing a totally new game that no one has played, state up front that we're pretty much going to wing it for a few turns and after that we can see if we want to keep playing or start over.
Start over is often better, and it lets people not worry about getting into an hour-long game where they badly misplayed the first few turns.
1: https://upload.snakesandlattes.com/rules/f/FarmingGameThe.pd...
It’s open source, all the rules have simple markdown formatting that’s easy to glance through on an phone, and they try to be as concise as possible.
But it’s hard work writing rules and I’ve never given it the effort I’d like to.
It comes with the (possibly harder) hard work of managing an open source project though.
My first thought is dedicating an hour or two a month to reviewing, merging, and deploying, but not sure if that'd be accurate.