Board game rulebooks
How to write rules people can actually use
Everyone complains about rulebooks. Almost nobody teaches how to write one. This is an attempt at the second thing — a handbook synthesised from 106 primary sources, with every claim linked back to where it came from.
“If someone can’t learn the game, they won’t play the game.”
— Michael “Curby” Lee, Board Game Editing Style Guide
Eight things that matter most
Distilled from the full set of 127 findings. Each links into the chapter that explains it.
State the goal before the rules
Readers who know the objective can attach every later rule to a purpose. “The goal is the game.”
Never use a term before you define it
The single most-cited reader irritation across fifteen years of forum threads.
One concept, one word, forever
The instinct to vary your wording is exactly wrong here. Synonyms make readers hunt for differences that don’t exist.
Conditions before effects
“If you roll a 5 or higher, draw a card” — skimmers can skip effects whose condition isn’t met, and misplay less.
Examples resolve ambiguity, not the obvious
Don’t illustrate the move everyone already understood. Illustrate the one that will otherwise become a forum thread.
Never hide a rule in an example
Re-readers skip examples by design. A rule placed there is invisible on every read after the first.
Put rules where a confused player will look
Organisation is a retrieval problem, not only a teaching one. Time the look-up, not just the read.
Blind test — and do not help them
Intervening trains testers to look at you instead of the page, and destroys the data you came for.
Where to start
The handbook →
17,000 words across seven parts: foundations, architecture, craft, production, process, evidence and templates.
All 127 findings →
The full research database, filterable by category and searchable, with a source link on every row.
68 real rulebooks →
What the community praises and what it condemns — named games, specific reasons, linked sources.
Pre-print checklist →
46 checks across 8 phases, from content completeness to handover. Your progress is saved in your browser.
Every source →
All 106 documents harvested for this project, with clickable URLs.
ฉบับภาษาไทย →
เว็บทั้งเว็บมีเวอร์ชันภาษาไทย — คู่มือฉบับเต็ม ฉบับเล่าสู่กันฟัง องค์ความรู้ ตัวอย่างจริง และเช็กลิสต์
Scope, honestly stated
This is targeted research, not an exhaustive crawl. BoardGameGeek hosts millions of posts and offers no bulk export, so threads were selected by relevance across roughly 2007–2026, weighted towards 2019–2026. Reddit could not be included — it blocks automated access.
Community opinion is opinion. Several games appear in both the praised and the criticised lists, because experienced people disagree about them. Nothing here is a verdict; everything here is attributed.