A Rule List Should Not Be The Length of a Small Novel
In Harry "bomberguy" Brewis's video about Sherlock, he says that "almost any story could be improved if, once the creator came to you and said they thought it was done, you forced them to take out 10, maybe 15 percent [of the story]. It forces them to reassess the importance of what's on the screen and remove indulgences that don't really add anything." After playing some more modern board games as part of my game development study, I believe that this rule should apply to game designers as well. Preferably with the added caveat that we waterboard any rule violators.
A very common thing I hear from friends and family alike is that they don't really "like" board games and I never quite got why. They like monopoly, chess, checkers, the pokemon card game for some, but they still are hesitant whenever I suggest we try out something new. I didn't really get this; they clearly like board games and enjoy playing them, so why refuse to learn new ones?
Oh sweet god almighty I fucking get it now.
I had the good luck of only stumbling upon relatively simple games, probably out of my reluctance to "historical" or empire-themed games, which tend to be a slog of conflicting rules and asterisks. I'd play games like Ascension, Sushi go, or Loveletter, all of which take like 3 minutes to explain, and I'd have a blast doing it. Sure, I'd occasionally pick up the complex stuff, but I saw it as an anomaly; a small percentage of a very wide and vast array of experiences. Fuck me was I wrong.
It took 40 goddamn minutes for me just to play the tutorial of Twilight Struggle. A deceptively simple and calm board game about birds (Wingspan) turned out to have a 30 minute tutorial with 4 different areas, 3 resources, changing turn lengths, and an amount of birds beyond my wildest imagination.1 Even games like Monopoly, which most people see as simple, is actually so complex and unintuitive that no one plays by the actual goddamn rules. Seriously, go look up Monopoly's rules right now, and spot how many "rules" you played by were house rules. This is not a joke, go check.
The more I play this stuff the more I earn an appreciation to the simple games - the ones where with like 4 rules you get an endless amount of replayability and depth. These games are hard to make, I won't deny that, but they're so much more interesting and entertaining than another psuedo-historical game about warships where I need to track every fucking dent on my lead engineer's left boot.
In fairness the game is clearly meant to be enjoyed by people who care less about the mechanics and more like birds. The game isn't bad, don't get me wrong it's a totally fine game, but it's clearly meant to appeal to the thematics.↩