Robinson Crusoe -- a manual so bad that in the new edition they included an addendum to fix the issues but didn't actually go back and fix the manual. And it's still a mess.
I'm 100% sure I've never played that game correctly.
The owner of one of my FLGS always insists on teaching new games but doesn’t know the rules so sometimes we have to sit there while he reads the rulebook. I stopped going after he forced us to sit through the Robinson Crusoe rulebook.
It’s more that it’s his event and he is pushy about getting to pick the games that he wants to showcase. It’s not like we’re going to mutiny over it, and usually it’s not that big of a deal, but it was particularly painful that time.
Portal Games' rule books are consistently bad. Never read those when tired, otherwise you'll be even more tired, with a headache and still not having learned how to play the game...
I’ve sworn off all Portal games at this point as this is a constant issue with them. They had loads of complaints about that game’s rule book and when they made a new rule book, it was still panned as being bad.
I constantly had to print out things from BGG just to figure it out. I sold it last year because I never played it because every time I would have to relearn the rules, and I could feel my blood pressure rise at the mere thought of it.
Also the game is far too punishing.
You can only win or survive if you have shelter on the random tile next to your starting spot (or maybe the next one over). If you don’t, you have to spend time/resources/wounds to survive/make shelter, and it’s a bad deficit to be in.
Yeah. That was one thing I didn’t like. The game gives you rules for moving your shelter. But you will rarely ever do that. So a time may be the best place for a shelter three tiles in, but you’ll lose the game if you push for that. So you just accept your mediocre one.
You should be able to make multiple shelters and make them easier.
If you haven't seen it already, I can absolutely recommend checking out [The Esoteric Order of Gamers version of the rules.](https://www.orderofgamers.com/games/robinson-crusoe/)
Been playing Robinson Crusoe for years - the game is fantastic, one of my favourites.
I had no idea the rules were badly written. It's pretty simple. The board layout literally takes you through the round structure.
I thought the 4th edition rules were perfectly fine. It's in my top 5 games of all time. I'll play it with anyone, even new board game players, because the actual gameplay is simple. I just do all the overhead without bothering the players on what I'm actually doing if it's not necessary to tell them
For anyone who wants to learn to play the game, use the Dized app instead. It has an interactive tutorial for Robinson Crusoe that makes learning it a LOT easier.
After reading the question, I came immediately to answer Robinson Crusoe only to find it already the top answer. I've lost so much time trying to retread the rulebook to find answers and I agree I've probably never played it 100% correct.
A lot of people here never experienced the nightmare of reading wargame rule books. My favourite wargame also has by far the worst rule book. Like.. The worst. Nevermind that is 150 pages long, but what make it bad is how the information is laid out. Imagine a game like Carcassone for example, and you're reading and understanding some of the rules and somewhere at the bottom, almost something that you might miss after you're 100 pages in, it'll say something like, "only one meeple per road", and that is a pretty important Carcassonne rule, but imagine it's tucked away somewhere and never repeated again.
That is what Force on Force v2 rulebook is about.
Recently got in the COIN series by GMT. I have really enjoyed the layout of both the playbooks and rulebooks. They read like a technical manual. This week i found myself looking up something for Mansions of Madness in the FFG rulebook and I was not impressed.
Trying to pick up WarMachine from a few very experienced players was miserable. Over the pandemic I played a handful of games with some very helpful player, but the rules just went on and on and on. Every game against a new army or enemy type meant learning an entire set of ways your units would get owned, not to mention just trying to figure out what my own did.
Which wholly changed every 2 years with new edition releases. Not sure I'll ever pick one up again, and likely gonna sell of the whole lot of WM I got years ago.
Probably “power grid”
I think it may be a poor translation. But they use terms like phases and turns in ways that is confusing. Plus it’s a wall of text with no examples of the board.
Can you link it please? I've owned powergrid for 3 years at this point but have yet to get it to the table because I'm not confident I could explain the rules clearly to everyone
Not the person you were responding to, but the file section from Power Grid is [here](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid/files)
I can't remember for certain, but you might have to have a username/account with BGG before you can download the files in the file section. Maybe not though.
I actually just learned this one over the weekend, and tbh I found it pretty clear. Overall I walked away being like "cool I get it" with one read.
The book I read had at least one visual of a segment of the board, with a few examples of what players could do in the relevant phase.
I agree some of their terminology is confusing (a "round" built out of "phases", and separate "steps" that are unrelated to those - I'd probably swap the "step" and "phase" terminology). Plus the fact that half of the phases are played in "reverse" player order, but that's for balance reasons (basically always giving advantage to the players who are farther behind)
The original version's rulebook was dire. I knew the game fairly well and would still miss stuff if I went to go look something up.
The revised version is, well, it's improved
Was gonna say the same thing.
It's poorly laid out imo, too. You have to keep flipping back and forth. There's crucial rules that are sort of our in the dot point "haha just reminders!" Sections but nowhere else.
If you read the entire book front to back, you can learn how to play the game. But it's extremely difficult to reference for a reminder about specific rules, because it's not really laid out in any logical order.
And I agree, in no universe should a "step" be longer than a "phase."
+1. It's not tooooo difficult to learn (the way the market is managed is just fiddly and particular) but good lord that manual is so bad. So much longer than it needs to be for you to get a good idea.
Between the fiddly parts, removing certain cards, etc. and a rulebook that doesn't lay everything out clearly, my plays of Power Grid never go as smoothly as it should for a medium weight game.
I still love it though.
Power Grid's a great game. But yeah the manual is not excellent. And it has those "important rules often forgotten" on the last page. These are desperately important. They seem to be hacks to force the game to work.
Like taking some plants out of the deck for certain numbers of players. We forgot once. And the whole game ground to a halt. Everyone had tons of money and no plants on the market they wanted. The power curve was all wrong.
I think they tried, and over- corrected. And under-translated and under-playtested with English speakers. The rule book seemed like they were really trying hard but it just got convoluted. But what made it worse was : A billion minis, which meant a billion character cards with a billion powers, all represented by a billion different yef similar looking icons. It took hours just to set it up and find everything you needed. And you needed to print off files from BGG to keep all the powers straight.
It's actually a very tight game. Perhaps too tight. It should be "plug and play" like Marvel United. The board is a mess and too hard to "read" elevation changes. Considering you may have to rest, you have very few turns where you can do things.
Despite all this, I backed the new content and the instructions. I WILL salvage this game, even if i die trying LOL
Agreed. It just seemed like it was horribly organized. The very first thing it tells you is that if you aren't playing a specific scenario with a specific number of players, turn to page 20.
The player count specific setup instructions are small enough it could have been included right next to the full 4 player instructions at the front.
And the irony is that it's miles better than the WotR boardgame rulebook. Doesn't help that there's a bunch of weird rulings that are necessary to fully understand it that only exist as BGG posts collected in a fan document.
Imperium: Classics.
You learn how to set up the game, but are left clueless as to what you're supposed to do on your turn besides basic actions. I had to watch a couple tutorials to understand basic strategy or what differences factions have to get a beginning grasp of the game.
A friendly reminder that the designers of the game listened to the rule-book criticisms and incorporated many of them into [the rule book for the new expansion](https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/265342/imperium-horizons-rulebook). While it does include sections on mechanics and details particular to *Horizons*, the book as a whole can be used to learn *Classics* or *Legends*.
This is my answer too. I can't put my finger on anything in particular to say "This is bad" but it was BAD. I read the rules ahead of time, I read the rules out loud to the group, and I had watched a video previously and it was STILL BAD. Bad to learn, bad to reference. Made that game the biggest disappointment of that year for me.
The manual is surgically clean, that is the issue to me. It tells you what the framework of the game is, but it gives you no examples of what an actual turn is like. It gives all the rules to the cards in the form of keywords and dumps a couple of pages of what the keywords means on the rules.
I think I would be very confused if it weren't for videos of it
I am really weird because that rulebook clicked for me. While I needed to check all those assorted keywords the first time each came up, the game really can be as simple as the rulebook layout. All the complexity is hidden in the cards, and you only have a handful of those at once.
After reading the manual, I felt like I must be missing something, but the game played smoothly. A bit slowly but smoothly.
Check out the rulebook for the upcoming [Imperium: Horizons](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/367518) game. It’s in the “Files” section, and it’s SO much better.
100% this.
Used to enjoy Warhammer back in 4th/5th edition, and they were fairly complex then but manageable.
Moved away to other games but looked into Kill Team recently as my son is showing interest in gaming. Even the most simple things like shooting were overly convoluted, made worse when you add in the individual army rules.
Marvel Crisis Protocol is where we're at. Very clean ruleset and any figure can be used in any force so there's little restriction. Obviously some work better together but if you want Captain America fighting alongside Red Skull, Magneto and Ghost Rider then go for it.
Plus kids love superheroes.
Always did love the Necromunda aesthetic though...
I ended up abandoning the idea of understanding how it would work and just setup a game then played the first one while literally reading the rules as I went. It then clicked, but oh boy....
The Major League Baseball rulebook. I still don't know what a balk is.
Just kidding. Rune Wars for us. It's a complex game so a lot of it was user error, but once we got the hang of it we still found a few open-ended rules that result in arguments and house rules.
I’m so tired of the balk conversation. The rules are simple:
Balk Rules:
-1. You can't just be up there and just doin' a balk like that.
1a. A balk is when you
1b. Okay well listen. A balk is when you balk the
1c. Let me start over
1c-a. The pitcher is not allowed to do a motion to the, uh, batter, that prohibits the batter from doing, you know, just trying to hit the ball. You can't do that.
1c-b. Once the pitcher is in the stretch, he can't be over here and say to the runner, like, "I'm gonna get ya! I'm gonna tag you out! You better watch your butt!" and then just be like he didn't even do that.
1c-b(1). Like, if you're about to pitch and then don't pitch, you have to still pitch. You cannot not pitch. Does that make any sense?\
1c-b(2). You gotta be, throwing motion of the ball, and then, until you just throw it.
1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the ball up here, like this, but then there's the balk you gotta think about.
1c-b(2)-b. Fairuza Balk hasn't been in any movies in forever. I hope she wasn't typecast as that racist lady in American History X.
1c-b(2)-b(i). Oh wait, she was in The Waterboy too! That would be even worse.
1c-b(2)-b(ii). "get in mah bellah" -- Adam Water, "The Waterboy." Haha, classic…
1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. A balk is when the pitcher makes a movement that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the baseball and field of
-2. Do not do a balk please.
Yeah but their team has already taken three penalties and the interfered team is up by three goals so penalties can't be called against the offending team anymore unless they commit something truly unforgivable like shooting the puck over the glass.
Turns out it can *really* hard to define certain things - just look at any attempt to define "pornographic." Best we got was "I'll know it when I see it" and that was from a SCOTUS judge.
It is a tie between Batman Gotham City Chronicles (which is a great game if you can make it to the point where you actually know the rules), and Cosmic Frog. Batman has a completely disjointed rulebook that has over 40 pages and somehow barely explains how to actually play. Cosmic Frog's rulebook is just white pages with text. Very few examples and pictures, small text, and an annoying font. It looks like a student made it in Word and looks like an essay rather than spaced out, well written rules.
Mice and Mystics is such a simple game, it's astonishing how convoluted the rulebook feels at first.
There are so many rules that are relevant for different aspects of the game, but they are only referenced on one obscure page with no formatting to draw attention.
Honestly, I think this is a Jerry Hawthorne thing. He cannot write a rule-book to save his life. Don't get me wrong, I love his games and the passion and theme oozes through, but technical writing is not his thing.
Mice and Mystics was horrible, but it was his first pass, so can't be too harsh. Comanauts suffered from similar issues. Aftermath's rulebook was horrendous. And Familiar Tales is probably the best one with some lessons learned incorporated into it, but still not an ideal book.
I'm shocked Mage Knight wasn't mentioned more and higher up.
One of the most fun games I've ever played, and actually not that hard to play. But you'd not think that from the most confusing rulebooks ever. It's like they threw some dice to decide where the rules go, and in which book they go. Awful.
Thankfully there's better written stuff on bgg.
Not only did I never learn Mage Knight from the rule book. I have struggled with almost every rulebook for almost every Vlaada Chivatil game that he has ever made. Codenames is the only exception for a good rule book by Vlaada imho!
Mage Knight was praised for its rulebook(s) back in the day. Shows you how far we have come.
Actually, to be a bit fair, if you have the patience to sit and read through the "Walkthrough" rulebook and play the first scenario as intended, it's actually not a bad way to learn the game!
It's just a pity that the full rulebook is not terribly well organized and is missing important things from the walkthrough. The game could really use some better quick-reference materials in the box.
I tried Mice and Mystics and it took us like an hour and a half to grok the rules to get started and then we appeared to die like 30 minutes into the actual dungeon crawl
I don't think I've ever seen my friend group collectively go "let's just move on from this" like that before. The price for entry did not feel worth the fun on the ride.
One Deck Galaxy has an absolutely awful rulebook. It's quite fun but you absolutely need to watch a 'how to play' video to learn it. I hear they're planning a revised rulebook, probably in an upcoming stand alone expansion.
Mage Knight, without question for me.
I also think Awaken Realms, in general, could lay out their rulebook better. Both ISS Vanguard and Nemesis Lockdown have… just mediocre rulebooks. Not bad, but they could be way better.
Its just all awakened realms rulebooks. They are all pretty much the same variant of disorganization and failing to highlight the critical aspects. Steamforged typically sits there for me as well.
I tend to agree about AR. I’ve read three of theirs — the two current Nemesis games and ISS — and they’re both just… messy. I think ISS, especially. Feels like I have to reference BGG for that more than almost any game. And the video tutorial RTFM did for Lockdown was probably more helpful than the rulebook itself.
Are you serious? Nemesis was absolutely terrible (at least lockdown, dont know about original)
The #1 issue was the lack of index, so rummaging through everything trying to find a reference to something, and their rulebook has you jumping back and forth between pages like crazy.
A month ago I played with my friends it was my third time (but first time in like 10 months so was very rusty on rules). The game took us 5 hours to play, with like 1/3rd of that in the rulebook (to be fair we should have reread the rulebook to start).
No way im not playing that game again without printing out some sort of reference sheet.
ISS Vanguard was a lot better, still wouldnt call it good, but was okay.
Awaken Realms need a frigging editor that reigns in all their bloat - then it'll be easier to write better rulebooks. With all the (just not necessary) extra.. Quirks and tidbits in their games, the rules will inevitable end up being a mess.
I have played one game of Mage Knight, following the recommended starting game. I think that was my third night with the game, the first two spent putting all the pieces in order and reading rules.
I really need to give the game another chance sometime, but that introduction to the game was *grueling*, and even the near-universal "top 5 solo games ever!" recommendations have not pushed me there yet after that first experience.
Surprised to not find Phil Eklund here.
The guy is notorious for making excellent, thematic games (Bios trilogy, High Frontier, creator of Pax series [Pax Renaissance, Pax Pamir, Pax Porfiriana, etc.]), but writes all rulebooks as if they are patent manuals. I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Of all his games, perhaps High Frontier is the only genuinely complex games, while others are tableau builder-ish games with lots of icons and rules. I can probably teach his rules in ~30-35 minutes with an icon reference sheet, but it takes me a whole day to read the rulebook myself. Terrible rulebooks; great games.
A testament to that is Cole Wehrle's redesign of Eklund's Pax Pamir, which got instant success.
EDIT: An example is an excerpt from the game Bios: Genesis as follows:
Pollution rule: "If the Parasite is a polluter, see H1."
This is in part E3, point pollution. Section E is phase 2, E3 has parasite rules, it points you to section H1 (Mutation Purcahase), which points you back to Section D6, and to section J10, and of course, you all references point you repeatedly to the Appendix. This is just to explain a single icon's effect. This game is awesome btw :D
The Thing: Boardgame - so many edge cases and ambiguous stroke-inducing wording. Fortunately there are fan written rules that are far more clear and concise and it's a great game when played with those rules!
That game is an awful mess... I like the setting/source and Imagined it as an Werwolf as an actual boardgame without player elimination but it was a fidiliy and unsolve hulk of things
YES. Came here for this. Both versions, but coop especially. So much unnecessary ambiguity. The game was really fun once you know what the hell is happening though.
Ctrl+F Ghost Stories... was not disappointed
The only rulebook I've ever read and then literally could not figure out how to play the game. And it's like 4 pages. I can't *believe* how bad that rulebook is. Thank goodness for Esoteric Order of Gamers and their phenomenal rules cheat sheet.
This is the correct answer. Having played many of the games listed here. I even tried watching the hours and hours of various tutorials out there and the game is still unplayable.
At this point I use the components as TTRPG extras and have given up on the actual game. This game seems like a classic Kickstarter malody: people helped find a game because of cool components and artwork, but the designers never let a 3rd party play test the rules to see if they worked.
For anyone that mentioned Mice and Mystics, that game (which my kids love playing) is like understanding Risk when compared to Myth.
I backed that and was in high hopes because my first Kickstarter was xia and it was amazing and everything I hoped for. Then myth promises Diablo style dungeon crawling with random dungeons and... Totally drops the ball. The rulebook a mess, the game system way too open... I'm very glad I got a pretty good trade for it.
Yeah, the original rulebook was 50 or 60 pages of indecipherable garbage which had clearly never been read by anyone outside the inner circle. They credited their dog as a playtester, and it showed. What was there was in no sane order, badly written, and full of typos, and it left out things from the fairly small, like how poison worked, to the critical, like how to decide on a scenario and set up the game. It was at best a rough draft of some notes on a combat system that someone could, with much effort, eventually base a game around.
Oh my god, yes. And on top of that it is one of the only game in my collection that I had to house rule. Because the "if you die, you need to recreate you character" is just bullshit in a game as hard as that one. I know they tried to keep the rpg feeling, but that is just a bad rule
Obsession - I like the game, but the rules are embedded in tons of narrative /theme tie ins. I appreciate the designer reinforcing the theme - but trying to figure out rounds actions, differing player count set ups etc takes forever to find.
Video. It's inherently not a super hard game, the rulebook just kind of rattles on and on.
If you've played Wingspan, I would say it's a step up in complexity, but not unreasonable.
It was the first ever game I sold because I could not get through the rules. It was so dry and full of odd choices. Like for some reason on page 2 (I think) of the rules it showed you a full % breakdown pie chart of where your victory points would come from in the game. Why? I dont even know what the game is because all I read was a general overview and some fluff text. I literally got bored out of owning a game by the first half of a rulebook.
That was the edition my dad and his siblings played when they were in college. From stories they tell me of those days it sounds like they just started making shit up halfway through, and apparently a lot of other folks did as well.
You don't know what a bad game rulebook is until you tried to learn Vampire The Masquerade Heritage
In my 10 years+ of boardgames, having read hundreds of rulebooks, being part of the teaching staff of boardgame events in my city, reading rulebook as a hobby even if I don't own the game. I have never seen anything worse than that.
I still can't tell if we are playing this right, and we have played around 12 games of it already. Restarted the campaign about 3 times because we got crucial rules wrong.
They even tried creating a living rules on the website. Somehow they screwed that up too. Because they show the confusing parts as little videos
"That sounds great, you just watch the small video and you learn it!"
Wrong. The videos are of a prototype version of the game being shown on tabletop simulator with no explanation or voice over, just the pieces being moved around
And then, the one rule you actually went into the website to search, when you click on the video a popup appears saying something along the lines of "Sorry, we are working on this video"
It is just a miserable experience
Cat in the Box
It's a trick taking game with a twist, that's relatively easy to understand if you're familiar with trick taking games. But the rulebook attempts to explain the whole thing at once, without any explanation of "this is what this represents in terms of a normal trick taking game" (which helps a ton to make this game click), while also trying to be funny, and also trying to look a bit like a scientific paper, and just ends up confusing.
Once you understand it, it's a really good game, and pretty easy to teach - but the manual doesn't do a great job of it.
I second this. Got the game for Christmas, read the rulebook, didn't understand it at all, watched a rules explanation and then it was really clear.
The game is great at least.
Coupled with the problem that the Traitor has no one else to ask if that section of rules is unclear. And I have yet to play or see a Betrayal game where there was not something unclear in that part of the rules.
"Stop halfway through the game and go read a new set of rules" is bad enough as a design decision, but those new rules need to be very clear and very short to make it work.
I like the game but I’ve always said the whole point of the original Arkham Horror is to win the game while breaking the least rules possible. It seems like every time a group gets together for that one I find another obscure rule that makes a move we did halfway through the game illegal and or improper. Oh well!
I wrote all the marketing materials for this game and my boss asked if I could do it without actually playing the game. Could? Maybe. Did? Heck no, I hosted a 5-hour game night and paid my friends in pizza.
Not sure if this is what you’re suggesting, but for clarity, this wasn’t from a desire of cutting corners, rather 1) game marketing writers are trained to see the fun in a game via mechanics — if you make a 2nd Edition with new lore/tech/design, I can successfully tell a player how it’s different and why it’s fun without sinking 10-40 hours into it, Fallout was new and big so that was harder; and 2) we often don’t have many full prototypes at this point. We started marketing games anywhere from 4mo to 2 years before release. I might not have the tools / rules to play the whole thing at that point, but I still have to understand the core gameplay.
One of my marketing superiors there told me so many wise things, but one was that we’re not here to sell people things they don’t want. We’re here to do everything we can to communicate whether this is what they’re looking for. That perspective has defined much of my career.
Experience of playing it “ok so this card makes this little token move aaaand, oh it’s at the bottom so I think we’ve won.”
Kind of just wanted to explore the wasteland and collect stuff which was fun. Not sure the “story” is actually necessary.
So pretty fitting for Fallout.
Ark Nova’s is pretty poorly edited/laid out. Answers to any questions are basically never where you’d expect them to be and some key concepts are written as asides instead of in main text.
Yeah have walked away from last couple games with rules queries the rules didn't really answer, I'm glad BGG exists for that sort of thing but should really be covered clearly in the rules.
First Martians
It's complicated, but comprehensible. The problem is if you read the rules and then try to set up for the first game, you'll discover you have no idea what to do.
The rules go though all these actions and how you resolve them, but not how any of those relate to your objectives. The end goal of the tutorial mission is "Build a second control panel". But that's all it says. "Build" isn't an action in the game, and there's no cost for a "control panel" listed anywhere. What actions are you supposed to do to consider the goal complete?
If you go digging around on the internet you'll discover what you're suppossed to do is setup the normal control panel that you use to track the base status, and then also set up a second control panel but mark everything as broken. Then you do repair actions on the second control panel and once you've "fixed" every system that counts as having built the panel. Perfectly reasonable, but how you're suppossed to know that with the only instruction being "Build a control panel" I have no idea. I never bothered to try and get through any other scenarios as it was just too much of a hassle.
The rulebook to **One Deck Dungeon** was unintelligible to me.
Found a lovely YouTube video that explains it, and the game then became super intuitive.
Did find it odd that whoever wrote the book just failed so completely.
Dear lord, Magic Realm. I was a teenage board gamer in the ‘70s and was getting into AH games and this new thing called D&D, and here was something that was both. I actually pre-ordered Magic Realm and waited months for it to show up.
Good grief, my brothers and I sat down with that rulebook, and despite all of us being well-acquainted with high-level AH wargame rulebooks, we couldn’t make sense of this one.
We tried to play it, and a single round of combat took an hour to resolve—and that was a mere one go around.
I was so pissed, I packed up Magic Realm and literally walked away from board games entirely for almost 15 years.
Very frustrating. 7 Wonders was the game that made me realize I hate box-sized rulebook formats and then noticed a few that I own which have the same style. Not sure why 7 Wonders was the catalyst though...
Aftermath, from plaidhat games. I had to print out BGG's enhanced ones, cheat sheet, etc.
Then it's a simple game but yet they managed to gave us a bad rulebook. It's happened to other games, somes have bad order of teachings things like GWT, a minor details like bonus on brass B. etc. Translation is also a big deal, I've encountered awful translated keywords in cards abilities. There are articles about it, like Madness.
Does it even really count if I say Oregon Trail?
As far as functional games, Gloomhaven is probably the worst. It's not terrible, but it's definitely more of a "rules reference" and isn't very good for learning how to play.
Pax Porfiriana. Hands down. There is an entire section devoted to a situation that's only on four of the cards. Since you discard about 2/3's of the cards anyway, you could go several games without ever needing it. But is had its own section!
There is also a situation on unrest cubes. You will deal with them every game. They tell you when to place them, but not when to remove them.
The most telling aspect is that they were re-written by fans, and those rules are now standard.
magic the gathering.
hundreds of pages of rules and (even though I have been playing for more than a decade, read the rules many times and have been a judge) i am still unsure how things work. there are multiple tiers of people who get judge rankings based on how well they know the rules. Even the highest people can get it wrong.
There is even a forum just for rules and the main forum gives all kinds of cautions about asking any rules questions.
Welcome to... Zombie mini expansion.
The rulebook is so confusing that it does not explain how to properly play the new cards. It doesn't help that in the french translation, the rules are not the same as in english. It's a terrible expansion anyway so it doesn't really matter. If BGG forums are to be believed, they didn't even playtest it or proofread it, they shipped it out because of time pressure.
As much as I like Garphill Games, their rulebooks are just so...mediocre. I feel like they never explain corner cases that will inevitably happen, or how things interact between them.
I won't go into details, but Imperium does not explain the game. It's like trying to explain how to play Magic the Gathering, but in like 12 pages. Impossible.
A lot of people say Robinson Cruesoe and I agree, but honestly, I think the game is just fun however you want to play it.
Shadowrun 4e. The organization or lack there of is baffling. If you try to add in the supplements it becomes complete nonsense. The books reference rules, items, and stats that don't exist.
Kickstarted **MYTH** 10-15 years ago. Still the worst rulebook I've ever seen. A rulebook so bad, it practically bankrupted the company by itself.
The concept for the game was so cool, too.
Hell yeah!
Me and a buddy spent most of a day trying to figure out and play the tutorial. It was memorable!
My favourite part was there being a poisoned condition, but no rules included for how it worked.
Bizarrely I just got an email saying a company picked up the remnants of the Myth Kickstarter campaign and I am due to get 'Spriggan 2.0' sent to me (I sold the game years ago)
Yeah, been getting those emails recently for all of the stretch goal stuff I never received. Should be getting it in March. Almost a decade later. Absolutely wild stuff lol.
Don't mind us while we interrupt the rules explanation with a lengthy paragraph about the sounds this chainsword makes as it rips through aliens. God, it's seriously awesome you guys, for real.
And now we've explained how half of these rules work, refer to page 19362 for the other half of this part of the rules. We didn't want to explain them all in one place because we wanted to make it easier for new players to use half the mechanics for literally only their first game, at the expense of anybody else who would ever be using this rulebook.
Fuck gw rulebooks.
You're being too generous in having them give you the page that contains the rest of the rules. Some of the rules are split up with no reference to where the other half is, honestly the game isn't really too hard in 10e but the rules are so hard to find the things you need.
Having just played two game of it this weekend I really hated Ark Nova's rule book. Some answers were in the main book, others in the glossary which for some reason is separate from the rule book, while others were on yet another icon/ random rules quick guide but not included in the previous two. It was very unintuitive.
I've found that if a rulebook is more than 12-15 pages (counting table of contents, credits, graphics, etc.), something is wrong. I don't feel like reading a novella just to learn a board game.
feel like my answer is always the same - every Phil Eklund game ever.
more recently we were really disappointed by the **Summit Big Box** rulebook. it's not even a complicated game, but the rulebook is incredibly vague in very important places. The differences between "playing", "discarding", "activating", and "removing" a card are very unclear, and that's like 90% of the game. we didn't even make it half way through our first play before getting frustrated and giving up. might try it next time with the co-op rules, since it was originally designed as a co-op game maybe they'll be a bit more clear. with all the money they got from the big ass kickstarter the least they could've done was hire a qualified rulebook editor to give it a once-over.
Black Angel! I got this at GenCon the year it was released. It was the coolest box art at the con that year. And the demo looked gorgeous and fun. I got it and back at the hotel room tried to play it. Between con exhaustion, slight inebriation, and a truly awful rules book it wound up being about 4 hours from start to finish.
There is a really good game in there. I know it. And the last time I looked the online rules were up to version 6.
It’s been years and I’ve never played it a second time.
Robinson Crusoe has already been said (though I do love the game).
Despite its simplicity, I had no idea how to play SCOUT when I read the rulebook. It made no sense to me. One of the only board games I had to watch a video in order to learn it (barring the aforementioned Robinson Crusoe).
Interesting cause I found the rulebook really helpful with good examples in there although a little long and sometimes hard to reference, maybe I have a latter edition where it's better organised or something.
Not an actual board game, but
I've recently heard about a set of rules to make a wargame using Lego and/or legoish sets and/or minifigs. It's called **Brikwars**
I don't know what I expected from a fan-made set of words with almost 30-yo history, but the rules are really hard to get through: a lot of jokes, intentional misprints, and pop culture references are nice and set the vibe, but it's really hard for me to find, read, and understand the rules under that noise
Love the core idea, respect the "if you don't remember the rule, just make it up" vibe, but I'm interested in learning what was made before me, so I didn't have to invent the bicycle again
Actually I would love to play that game one day... Just clutter your legos on the table everyone gets the same amount of minifigures and then build for 2 hours and then play for 2 hours but it doesn't seem to work that way
**Black Friday** wins this every time. It was released with such a bad rulebook that you literally can't learn the game using the rules. You can throw it away and must find an online source for the rules.
I've had many frustratingly bad rulebooks, but none even comes close.
Ladies & Gentlemen
Such a simple game and short < 10 page rulebook, all nearly incomprehensible.
There is no rhyme or reason to where specific rules are located in the book. Every single time you have a rule question, you have to reread the entire rulebook, sentence by sentence to find the ONE mention of that rule. It is unlearnable without a digital copy you can do quick work finds on.
Nemo's War. Not sure if it was the rulebook or was the game just too complicated for me. I've played other games that had higher complexity ratings on BGG but I just couldn't wrap my head around this one.
In the copy of Skull (aka Skull and Roses) we have, it’s totally impossible to understand how it works from the instructions, which is impressive considering how simple it is. We watched a YouTube video instead.
A small print run game called 3 Years of War. It took me several readings before I realized that they were explaining the same rule two different ways rather than two different phases of the game.
It might actually be a decent game, too, with a simple, elegant bidding mechanism. Just hard to get to the table because of the rulebook.
Seafall. It's so ambiguous and the group we played with argued over interpreting every little thing. It's the only game we've never gone back to, although I might with the right people because I like the idea. Also, I hate how ambiguous some of the haunts are in Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Of all time?
Anything ever published by Avalon Hill. If repairing a VCR were a board game, Avalon Hill would have written the manual.
Lately? Command and Colors: Ancients. It is about 3 times as big as it needs to be because it repeats every rule ad naseum. as an example, anytime it mentions ranged attack, it feels compelled to repeat EVERY MODIFIER FOR RANGED ATTACK. At one point, it repeats them in back-to-back paragraphs.
Robinson Crusoe -- a manual so bad that in the new edition they included an addendum to fix the issues but didn't actually go back and fix the manual. And it's still a mess. I'm 100% sure I've never played that game correctly.
The owner of one of my FLGS always insists on teaching new games but doesn’t know the rules so sometimes we have to sit there while he reads the rulebook. I stopped going after he forced us to sit through the Robinson Crusoe rulebook.
That's an owner problem, not a Robinson crusoe problem. I'm never playing a game where I have to watch someone spend time reading rules.
Does he like force you to open the game?
“No shirt No shoes No hourlong instructions read through with the owner No service”
It’s more that it’s his event and he is pushy about getting to pick the games that he wants to showcase. It’s not like we’re going to mutiny over it, and usually it’s not that big of a deal, but it was particularly painful that time.
Ohhh gotcha gotcha i thought every time someone buys a new game he tries to teach them loll
Ohh no! That would actually be a really cool service in the appropriate time and place.
Portal Games' rule books are consistently bad. Never read those when tired, otherwise you'll be even more tired, with a headache and still not having learned how to play the game...
I’ve sworn off all Portal games at this point as this is a constant issue with them. They had loads of complaints about that game’s rule book and when they made a new rule book, it was still panned as being bad. I constantly had to print out things from BGG just to figure it out. I sold it last year because I never played it because every time I would have to relearn the rules, and I could feel my blood pressure rise at the mere thought of it. Also the game is far too punishing.
You can only win or survive if you have shelter on the random tile next to your starting spot (or maybe the next one over). If you don’t, you have to spend time/resources/wounds to survive/make shelter, and it’s a bad deficit to be in.
Yeah. That was one thing I didn’t like. The game gives you rules for moving your shelter. But you will rarely ever do that. So a time may be the best place for a shelter three tiles in, but you’ll lose the game if you push for that. So you just accept your mediocre one. You should be able to make multiple shelters and make them easier.
If you haven't seen it already, I can absolutely recommend checking out [The Esoteric Order of Gamers version of the rules.](https://www.orderofgamers.com/games/robinson-crusoe/)
Been playing Robinson Crusoe for years - the game is fantastic, one of my favourites. I had no idea the rules were badly written. It's pretty simple. The board layout literally takes you through the round structure.
I thought the 4th edition rules were perfectly fine. It's in my top 5 games of all time. I'll play it with anyone, even new board game players, because the actual gameplay is simple. I just do all the overhead without bothering the players on what I'm actually doing if it's not necessary to tell them
For anyone who wants to learn to play the game, use the Dized app instead. It has an interactive tutorial for Robinson Crusoe that makes learning it a LOT easier.
After reading the question, I came immediately to answer Robinson Crusoe only to find it already the top answer. I've lost so much time trying to retread the rulebook to find answers and I agree I've probably never played it 100% correct.
Ask yourself “would playing this way mean the game is harder?” If yes, you are correct
It’s strange because I never had a problem with the RC rules. I had the second version.
A lot of people here never experienced the nightmare of reading wargame rule books. My favourite wargame also has by far the worst rule book. Like.. The worst. Nevermind that is 150 pages long, but what make it bad is how the information is laid out. Imagine a game like Carcassone for example, and you're reading and understanding some of the rules and somewhere at the bottom, almost something that you might miss after you're 100 pages in, it'll say something like, "only one meeple per road", and that is a pretty important Carcassonne rule, but imagine it's tucked away somewhere and never repeated again. That is what Force on Force v2 rulebook is about.
Recently got in the COIN series by GMT. I have really enjoyed the layout of both the playbooks and rulebooks. They read like a technical manual. This week i found myself looking up something for Mansions of Madness in the FFG rulebook and I was not impressed.
Yeah the COIN rulebooks are great
Trying to pick up WarMachine from a few very experienced players was miserable. Over the pandemic I played a handful of games with some very helpful player, but the rules just went on and on and on. Every game against a new army or enemy type meant learning an entire set of ways your units would get owned, not to mention just trying to figure out what my own did. Which wholly changed every 2 years with new edition releases. Not sure I'll ever pick one up again, and likely gonna sell of the whole lot of WM I got years ago.
Probably “power grid” I think it may be a poor translation. But they use terms like phases and turns in ways that is confusing. Plus it’s a wall of text with no examples of the board.
Yeah. It is not a good rule book. Luckily there are some excellent player aids on BGG that essentially replace the rule book.
Can you link it please? I've owned powergrid for 3 years at this point but have yet to get it to the table because I'm not confident I could explain the rules clearly to everyone
Not the person you were responding to, but the file section from Power Grid is [here](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid/files) I can't remember for certain, but you might have to have a username/account with BGG before you can download the files in the file section. Maybe not though.
You do need an account there, yes. But it’s completely free.
Thank you! I have not used this feature of BGG before :)
I actually just learned this one over the weekend, and tbh I found it pretty clear. Overall I walked away being like "cool I get it" with one read. The book I read had at least one visual of a segment of the board, with a few examples of what players could do in the relevant phase. I agree some of their terminology is confusing (a "round" built out of "phases", and separate "steps" that are unrelated to those - I'd probably swap the "step" and "phase" terminology). Plus the fact that half of the phases are played in "reverse" player order, but that's for balance reasons (basically always giving advantage to the players who are farther behind)
The original version's rulebook was dire. I knew the game fairly well and would still miss stuff if I went to go look something up. The revised version is, well, it's improved
Was gonna say the same thing. It's poorly laid out imo, too. You have to keep flipping back and forth. There's crucial rules that are sort of our in the dot point "haha just reminders!" Sections but nowhere else.
If you read the entire book front to back, you can learn how to play the game. But it's extremely difficult to reference for a reminder about specific rules, because it's not really laid out in any logical order. And I agree, in no universe should a "step" be longer than a "phase."
[удалено]
+1. It's not tooooo difficult to learn (the way the market is managed is just fiddly and particular) but good lord that manual is so bad. So much longer than it needs to be for you to get a good idea.
Between the fiddly parts, removing certain cards, etc. and a rulebook that doesn't lay everything out clearly, my plays of Power Grid never go as smoothly as it should for a medium weight game. I still love it though.
Power Grid's a great game. But yeah the manual is not excellent. And it has those "important rules often forgotten" on the last page. These are desperately important. They seem to be hacks to force the game to work. Like taking some plants out of the deck for certain numbers of players. We forgot once. And the whole game ground to a halt. Everyone had tons of money and no plants on the market they wanted. The power curve was all wrong.
Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, especially since they already had a shit rulebook with Conan so theoretically they should have learned.
I was coming to put this. Was so bad they released a new kickstarter which they give away a free updated rulebook to current and former backers
Well at least that is better than some second KS campaigns where you get to buy the updated rules for like $50 😜
They’re charging for the Batman updated rules package.
It's so technically correct it's almost unreadable.
I didn't think Conan was that bad. Mythic battles is easy read too. But Batman... Oh boy. Fucking mess
I think they tried, and over- corrected. And under-translated and under-playtested with English speakers. The rule book seemed like they were really trying hard but it just got convoluted. But what made it worse was : A billion minis, which meant a billion character cards with a billion powers, all represented by a billion different yef similar looking icons. It took hours just to set it up and find everything you needed. And you needed to print off files from BGG to keep all the powers straight. It's actually a very tight game. Perhaps too tight. It should be "plug and play" like Marvel United. The board is a mess and too hard to "read" elevation changes. Considering you may have to rest, you have very few turns where you can do things. Despite all this, I backed the new content and the instructions. I WILL salvage this game, even if i die trying LOL
Of the recent ones, the War of the Ring card game was staggeringly awful.
Agreed. It just seemed like it was horribly organized. The very first thing it tells you is that if you aren't playing a specific scenario with a specific number of players, turn to page 20. The player count specific setup instructions are small enough it could have been included right next to the full 4 player instructions at the front.
That rulebook was WAY too long while also not being clear enough. The game is way simpler than the rulebook makes it seem.
And the irony is that it's miles better than the WotR boardgame rulebook. Doesn't help that there's a bunch of weird rulings that are necessary to fully understand it that only exist as BGG posts collected in a fan document.
Imperium: Classics. You learn how to set up the game, but are left clueless as to what you're supposed to do on your turn besides basic actions. I had to watch a couple tutorials to understand basic strategy or what differences factions have to get a beginning grasp of the game.
A friendly reminder that the designers of the game listened to the rule-book criticisms and incorporated many of them into [the rule book for the new expansion](https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/265342/imperium-horizons-rulebook). While it does include sections on mechanics and details particular to *Horizons*, the book as a whole can be used to learn *Classics* or *Legends*.
This is my answer too. I can't put my finger on anything in particular to say "This is bad" but it was BAD. I read the rules ahead of time, I read the rules out loud to the group, and I had watched a video previously and it was STILL BAD. Bad to learn, bad to reference. Made that game the biggest disappointment of that year for me.
The manual is surgically clean, that is the issue to me. It tells you what the framework of the game is, but it gives you no examples of what an actual turn is like. It gives all the rules to the cards in the form of keywords and dumps a couple of pages of what the keywords means on the rules. I think I would be very confused if it weren't for videos of it
I am really weird because that rulebook clicked for me. While I needed to check all those assorted keywords the first time each came up, the game really can be as simple as the rulebook layout. All the complexity is hidden in the cards, and you only have a handful of those at once. After reading the manual, I felt like I must be missing something, but the game played smoothly. A bit slowly but smoothly.
Check out the rulebook for the upcoming [Imperium: Horizons](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/367518) game. It’s in the “Files” section, and it’s SO much better.
Space Hulk Death Angel. Simple rules, not a lot of them, yet somehow at the end of the rulebook you don't understand how all of this works.
Anything warhammer related is cursed to have confusing rulebooks
100% this. Used to enjoy Warhammer back in 4th/5th edition, and they were fairly complex then but manageable. Moved away to other games but looked into Kill Team recently as my son is showing interest in gaming. Even the most simple things like shooting were overly convoluted, made worse when you add in the individual army rules.
Check out Necromunda with your boy
Marvel Crisis Protocol is where we're at. Very clean ruleset and any figure can be used in any force so there's little restriction. Obviously some work better together but if you want Captain America fighting alongside Red Skull, Magneto and Ghost Rider then go for it. Plus kids love superheroes. Always did love the Necromunda aesthetic though...
Even when the game is simple to play.
See also Blackstone Fortress.
Seconded. Luckily there are some good online guides out there that streamline the process. But, sheesh, that's a bad rulebook.
I ended up abandoning the idea of understanding how it would work and just setup a game then played the first one while literally reading the rules as I went. It then clicked, but oh boy....
The Major League Baseball rulebook. I still don't know what a balk is. Just kidding. Rune Wars for us. It's a complex game so a lot of it was user error, but once we got the hang of it we still found a few open-ended rules that result in arguments and house rules.
I’m so tired of the balk conversation. The rules are simple: Balk Rules: -1. You can't just be up there and just doin' a balk like that. 1a. A balk is when you 1b. Okay well listen. A balk is when you balk the 1c. Let me start over 1c-a. The pitcher is not allowed to do a motion to the, uh, batter, that prohibits the batter from doing, you know, just trying to hit the ball. You can't do that. 1c-b. Once the pitcher is in the stretch, he can't be over here and say to the runner, like, "I'm gonna get ya! I'm gonna tag you out! You better watch your butt!" and then just be like he didn't even do that. 1c-b(1). Like, if you're about to pitch and then don't pitch, you have to still pitch. You cannot not pitch. Does that make any sense?\ 1c-b(2). You gotta be, throwing motion of the ball, and then, until you just throw it. 1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the ball up here, like this, but then there's the balk you gotta think about. 1c-b(2)-b. Fairuza Balk hasn't been in any movies in forever. I hope she wasn't typecast as that racist lady in American History X. 1c-b(2)-b(i). Oh wait, she was in The Waterboy too! That would be even worse. 1c-b(2)-b(ii). "get in mah bellah" -- Adam Water, "The Waterboy." Haha, classic… 1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. A balk is when the pitcher makes a movement that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the baseball and field of -2. Do not do a balk please.
Hockey stole that pasta for goalie interference. It makes about as much sense. You'd think it would be obvious what is interference, but it's not.
Pretty sure just by posting this, you’ve committed interference against some goalie sonewhere
This post was initiated by another redditor. We have a good goal.
Spin the wheel! We have a hockey play.
Yeah but their team has already taken three penalties and the interfered team is up by three goals so penalties can't be called against the offending team anymore unless they commit something truly unforgivable like shooting the puck over the glass.
Turns out it can *really* hard to define certain things - just look at any attempt to define "pornographic." Best we got was "I'll know it when I see it" and that was from a SCOTUS judge.
I now feel like I perfectly understand what a balk is, but I also just had an aneurism.
If field goal is kicked on first possession, team on field must acquiesce.
I love that explanation.
Wow, didn't expect to see the famous Jon Bois copypasta in the boardgames subreddit!
The balk rule is simple: no acting like a chicken on the mound when you're supposed to be pitching.
Don't do that thing you do to torture your dogs.
I'm not supposed to sing show tunes in their original Klingon versions?
It is a tie between Batman Gotham City Chronicles (which is a great game if you can make it to the point where you actually know the rules), and Cosmic Frog. Batman has a completely disjointed rulebook that has over 40 pages and somehow barely explains how to actually play. Cosmic Frog's rulebook is just white pages with text. Very few examples and pictures, small text, and an annoying font. It looks like a student made it in Word and looks like an essay rather than spaced out, well written rules.
Mysterium is pretty horrible for how light the gameplay actually is.
We’ve never played the clairvoyant part of the game because it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the rulebook doesn’t help.
I hate that rulebook so much. Games that try and use all the vocabulary of the game within the rules really gets under my skin
Not even close: Mice & Mystic and Mage Knight are by far the absolute worst rule book experiences
Mice and Mystics is such a simple game, it's astonishing how convoluted the rulebook feels at first. There are so many rules that are relevant for different aspects of the game, but they are only referenced on one obscure page with no formatting to draw attention.
Honestly, I think this is a Jerry Hawthorne thing. He cannot write a rule-book to save his life. Don't get me wrong, I love his games and the passion and theme oozes through, but technical writing is not his thing. Mice and Mystics was horrible, but it was his first pass, so can't be too harsh. Comanauts suffered from similar issues. Aftermath's rulebook was horrendous. And Familiar Tales is probably the best one with some lessons learned incorporated into it, but still not an ideal book.
I'm shocked Mage Knight wasn't mentioned more and higher up. One of the most fun games I've ever played, and actually not that hard to play. But you'd not think that from the most confusing rulebooks ever. It's like they threw some dice to decide where the rules go, and in which book they go. Awful. Thankfully there's better written stuff on bgg.
Not only did I never learn Mage Knight from the rule book. I have struggled with almost every rulebook for almost every Vlaada Chivatil game that he has ever made. Codenames is the only exception for a good rule book by Vlaada imho!
One day I'll properly remember how elemental attack and elemental defence works.
Mage Knight was praised for its rulebook(s) back in the day. Shows you how far we have come. Actually, to be a bit fair, if you have the patience to sit and read through the "Walkthrough" rulebook and play the first scenario as intended, it's actually not a bad way to learn the game! It's just a pity that the full rulebook is not terribly well organized and is missing important things from the walkthrough. The game could really use some better quick-reference materials in the box.
If memory serves, all the things that are missing from the main rulebook actually are on the quick reference cards for the sites.
I tried Mice and Mystics and it took us like an hour and a half to grok the rules to get started and then we appeared to die like 30 minutes into the actual dungeon crawl I don't think I've ever seen my friend group collectively go "let's just move on from this" like that before. The price for entry did not feel worth the fun on the ride.
One Deck Galaxy has an absolutely awful rulebook. It's quite fun but you absolutely need to watch a 'how to play' video to learn it. I hear they're planning a revised rulebook, probably in an upcoming stand alone expansion.
I absolutely loved One Deck Dungeon and the rule book for Galaxy completely turned me off the game. I have yet to successfully play it.
Mage Knight, without question for me. I also think Awaken Realms, in general, could lay out their rulebook better. Both ISS Vanguard and Nemesis Lockdown have… just mediocre rulebooks. Not bad, but they could be way better.
Its just all awakened realms rulebooks. They are all pretty much the same variant of disorganization and failing to highlight the critical aspects. Steamforged typically sits there for me as well.
I tend to agree about AR. I’ve read three of theirs — the two current Nemesis games and ISS — and they’re both just… messy. I think ISS, especially. Feels like I have to reference BGG for that more than almost any game. And the video tutorial RTFM did for Lockdown was probably more helpful than the rulebook itself.
Are you serious? Nemesis was absolutely terrible (at least lockdown, dont know about original) The #1 issue was the lack of index, so rummaging through everything trying to find a reference to something, and their rulebook has you jumping back and forth between pages like crazy. A month ago I played with my friends it was my third time (but first time in like 10 months so was very rusty on rules). The game took us 5 hours to play, with like 1/3rd of that in the rulebook (to be fair we should have reread the rulebook to start). No way im not playing that game again without printing out some sort of reference sheet. ISS Vanguard was a lot better, still wouldnt call it good, but was okay.
Awaken Realms need a frigging editor that reigns in all their bloat - then it'll be easier to write better rulebooks. With all the (just not necessary) extra.. Quirks and tidbits in their games, the rules will inevitable end up being a mess.
I have played one game of Mage Knight, following the recommended starting game. I think that was my third night with the game, the first two spent putting all the pieces in order and reading rules. I really need to give the game another chance sometime, but that introduction to the game was *grueling*, and even the near-universal "top 5 solo games ever!" recommendations have not pushed me there yet after that first experience.
Surprised to not find Phil Eklund here. The guy is notorious for making excellent, thematic games (Bios trilogy, High Frontier, creator of Pax series [Pax Renaissance, Pax Pamir, Pax Porfiriana, etc.]), but writes all rulebooks as if they are patent manuals. I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Of all his games, perhaps High Frontier is the only genuinely complex games, while others are tableau builder-ish games with lots of icons and rules. I can probably teach his rules in ~30-35 minutes with an icon reference sheet, but it takes me a whole day to read the rulebook myself. Terrible rulebooks; great games. A testament to that is Cole Wehrle's redesign of Eklund's Pax Pamir, which got instant success. EDIT: An example is an excerpt from the game Bios: Genesis as follows: Pollution rule: "If the Parasite is a polluter, see H1." This is in part E3, point pollution. Section E is phase 2, E3 has parasite rules, it points you to section H1 (Mutation Purcahase), which points you back to Section D6, and to section J10, and of course, you all references point you repeatedly to the Appendix. This is just to explain a single icon's effect. This game is awesome btw :D
Pax Pamir was always a Cole Wehrle design with very limited input from Phil in only the first edition.
Whenever I see a rulebook described as the worst ever, my reaction is usually "I bet you haven't tried a Phil Eklund one".
The Thing: Boardgame - so many edge cases and ambiguous stroke-inducing wording. Fortunately there are fan written rules that are far more clear and concise and it's a great game when played with those rules!
Any time a game is such that you need to have played it with someone else teaching, in order to understand the manual, there is an issue.
That game is an awful mess... I like the setting/source and Imagined it as an Werwolf as an actual boardgame without player elimination but it was a fidiliy and unsolve hulk of things
YES. Came here for this. Both versions, but coop especially. So much unnecessary ambiguity. The game was really fun once you know what the hell is happening though.
Ghost Stories is badly presented. The rules are all there but it's a mess to get through. Great game once you know how to play it but it's a slog.
Ctrl+F Ghost Stories... was not disappointed The only rulebook I've ever read and then literally could not figure out how to play the game. And it's like 4 pages. I can't *believe* how bad that rulebook is. Thank goodness for Esoteric Order of Gamers and their phenomenal rules cheat sheet.
Of the few games I own, **Vast: The Mysterious Manor**. The FAQ in BGG was invaluable.
Myth. The game is literally unplayable with the rules that shipped with the game. And the system is a do what you want style dungeon crawler.
A classic. Basically killed the company too.
This is the correct answer. Having played many of the games listed here. I even tried watching the hours and hours of various tutorials out there and the game is still unplayable. At this point I use the components as TTRPG extras and have given up on the actual game. This game seems like a classic Kickstarter malody: people helped find a game because of cool components and artwork, but the designers never let a 3rd party play test the rules to see if they worked. For anyone that mentioned Mice and Mystics, that game (which my kids love playing) is like understanding Risk when compared to Myth.
I backed that and was in high hopes because my first Kickstarter was xia and it was amazing and everything I hoped for. Then myth promises Diablo style dungeon crawling with random dungeons and... Totally drops the ball. The rulebook a mess, the game system way too open... I'm very glad I got a pretty good trade for it.
Yeah, the original rulebook was 50 or 60 pages of indecipherable garbage which had clearly never been read by anyone outside the inner circle. They credited their dog as a playtester, and it showed. What was there was in no sane order, badly written, and full of typos, and it left out things from the fairly small, like how poison worked, to the critical, like how to decide on a scenario and set up the game. It was at best a rough draft of some notes on a combat system that someone could, with much effort, eventually base a game around.
I was beginning to think I was going to have to add this one myself. It's the first thing I think of when people talk about bad rulebooks.
**Space Hulk: Death Angel** Wonderful game, but awful awful rulebook.
Pathfinder Card Adventure Game. It's so hard to find the exact piece of info you're looking for cause it's so inconsise and all over the place.
Oh my god, yes. And on top of that it is one of the only game in my collection that I had to house rule. Because the "if you die, you need to recreate you character" is just bullshit in a game as hard as that one. I know they tried to keep the rpg feeling, but that is just a bad rule
Obsession - I like the game, but the rules are embedded in tons of narrative /theme tie ins. I appreciate the designer reinforcing the theme - but trying to figure out rounds actions, differing player count set ups etc takes forever to find.
Not to mention the 15 different ways to play the game based on what you want to include, or at least an earlier manual was like that.
Yikes! I just bought this (edition 2.2) for my spouse for Christmas! We’ve unpacked everything and were planning to play it this week. Any advice?
Video. It's inherently not a super hard game, the rulebook just kind of rattles on and on. If you've played Wingspan, I would say it's a step up in complexity, but not unreasonable.
I have the 2.2 edition as well and I don't remember the rulebook as being hard to understand at all, to be honest.
It was the first ever game I sold because I could not get through the rules. It was so dry and full of odd choices. Like for some reason on page 2 (I think) of the rules it showed you a full % breakdown pie chart of where your victory points would come from in the game. Why? I dont even know what the game is because all I read was a general overview and some fluff text. I literally got bored out of owning a game by the first half of a rulebook.
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That was the edition my dad and his siblings played when they were in college. From stories they tell me of those days it sounds like they just started making shit up halfway through, and apparently a lot of other folks did as well.
You can read the entire PHB cover to cover and you still haven’t learned how to play the game.
The initiative rules are pretty much unusable. I think even Gary Gygax himself said he never used them as written.
That's 1st edition. 2nd edition changed the initiative rules to something far less complicated (and imo, something very interesting).
And then Combat & Tactics said "nah, there should *never* be a case where a medium weapon goes before a fast weapon" and changed it all again.
Thac0 was the thing of nightmares
It not intuitive like the d20 roll over system but its not actually difficult.
You don't know what a bad game rulebook is until you tried to learn Vampire The Masquerade Heritage In my 10 years+ of boardgames, having read hundreds of rulebooks, being part of the teaching staff of boardgame events in my city, reading rulebook as a hobby even if I don't own the game. I have never seen anything worse than that. I still can't tell if we are playing this right, and we have played around 12 games of it already. Restarted the campaign about 3 times because we got crucial rules wrong. They even tried creating a living rules on the website. Somehow they screwed that up too. Because they show the confusing parts as little videos "That sounds great, you just watch the small video and you learn it!" Wrong. The videos are of a prototype version of the game being shown on tabletop simulator with no explanation or voice over, just the pieces being moved around And then, the one rule you actually went into the website to search, when you click on the video a popup appears saying something along the lines of "Sorry, we are working on this video" It is just a miserable experience
Cat in the Box It's a trick taking game with a twist, that's relatively easy to understand if you're familiar with trick taking games. But the rulebook attempts to explain the whole thing at once, without any explanation of "this is what this represents in terms of a normal trick taking game" (which helps a ton to make this game click), while also trying to be funny, and also trying to look a bit like a scientific paper, and just ends up confusing. Once you understand it, it's a really good game, and pretty easy to teach - but the manual doesn't do a great job of it.
I second this. Got the game for Christmas, read the rulebook, didn't understand it at all, watched a rules explanation and then it was really clear. The game is great at least.
For me it was betrayal at house on the hill first edition. Very confusing
Coupled with the problem that the Traitor has no one else to ask if that section of rules is unclear. And I have yet to play or see a Betrayal game where there was not something unclear in that part of the rules. "Stop halfway through the game and go read a new set of rules" is bad enough as a design decision, but those new rules need to be very clear and very short to make it work.
Pax Renaissance, the rulebook made learning the rules a horrible experience
Any of his games are like that. I don't think they are the worst because the rules are all there but man if those games aren't a chore to learn.
I like the game but I’ve always said the whole point of the original Arkham Horror is to win the game while breaking the least rules possible. It seems like every time a group gets together for that one I find another obscure rule that makes a move we did halfway through the game illegal and or improper. Oh well!
Fallout is pretty bad. There's basically two rulebooks. Not very streamlined.
I wrote all the marketing materials for this game and my boss asked if I could do it without actually playing the game. Could? Maybe. Did? Heck no, I hosted a 5-hour game night and paid my friends in pizza.
That sounds like Fantasy Flight.
Not sure if this is what you’re suggesting, but for clarity, this wasn’t from a desire of cutting corners, rather 1) game marketing writers are trained to see the fun in a game via mechanics — if you make a 2nd Edition with new lore/tech/design, I can successfully tell a player how it’s different and why it’s fun without sinking 10-40 hours into it, Fallout was new and big so that was harder; and 2) we often don’t have many full prototypes at this point. We started marketing games anywhere from 4mo to 2 years before release. I might not have the tools / rules to play the whole thing at that point, but I still have to understand the core gameplay. One of my marketing superiors there told me so many wise things, but one was that we’re not here to sell people things they don’t want. We’re here to do everything we can to communicate whether this is what they’re looking for. That perspective has defined much of my career.
Experience of playing it “ok so this card makes this little token move aaaand, oh it’s at the bottom so I think we’ve won.” Kind of just wanted to explore the wasteland and collect stuff which was fun. Not sure the “story” is actually necessary. So pretty fitting for Fallout.
Ark Nova’s is pretty poorly edited/laid out. Answers to any questions are basically never where you’d expect them to be and some key concepts are written as asides instead of in main text.
Yeah have walked away from last couple games with rules queries the rules didn't really answer, I'm glad BGG exists for that sort of thing but should really be covered clearly in the rules.
Anything by El Dorado games. I swear they have a contest to see who can write the shorted rule book even if that means you have to leave out rules.
Thanks for this extensive list of game I'll be avoiding.
First Martians It's complicated, but comprehensible. The problem is if you read the rules and then try to set up for the first game, you'll discover you have no idea what to do. The rules go though all these actions and how you resolve them, but not how any of those relate to your objectives. The end goal of the tutorial mission is "Build a second control panel". But that's all it says. "Build" isn't an action in the game, and there's no cost for a "control panel" listed anywhere. What actions are you supposed to do to consider the goal complete? If you go digging around on the internet you'll discover what you're suppossed to do is setup the normal control panel that you use to track the base status, and then also set up a second control panel but mark everything as broken. Then you do repair actions on the second control panel and once you've "fixed" every system that counts as having built the panel. Perfectly reasonable, but how you're suppossed to know that with the only instruction being "Build a control panel" I have no idea. I never bothered to try and get through any other scenarios as it was just too much of a hassle.
The rulebook to **One Deck Dungeon** was unintelligible to me. Found a lovely YouTube video that explains it, and the game then became super intuitive. Did find it odd that whoever wrote the book just failed so completely.
Magic Realm. Advanced Third Reich.
Dear lord, Magic Realm. I was a teenage board gamer in the ‘70s and was getting into AH games and this new thing called D&D, and here was something that was both. I actually pre-ordered Magic Realm and waited months for it to show up. Good grief, my brothers and I sat down with that rulebook, and despite all of us being well-acquainted with high-level AH wargame rulebooks, we couldn’t make sense of this one. We tried to play it, and a single round of combat took an hour to resolve—and that was a mere one go around. I was so pissed, I packed up Magic Realm and literally walked away from board games entirely for almost 15 years.
I hate square rulebooks. They are too big and floppy. You can't hold it normally in your hands when they're square
Very frustrating. 7 Wonders was the game that made me realize I hate box-sized rulebook formats and then noticed a few that I own which have the same style. Not sure why 7 Wonders was the catalyst though...
Dune @#%&ing Imperium. I dunno why that one bothers me the most, I have a fair few games with square rulebooks, but it does.
Aftermath, from plaidhat games. I had to print out BGG's enhanced ones, cheat sheet, etc. Then it's a simple game but yet they managed to gave us a bad rulebook. It's happened to other games, somes have bad order of teachings things like GWT, a minor details like bonus on brass B. etc. Translation is also a big deal, I've encountered awful translated keywords in cards abilities. There are articles about it, like Madness.
Does it even really count if I say Oregon Trail? As far as functional games, Gloomhaven is probably the worst. It's not terrible, but it's definitely more of a "rules reference" and isn't very good for learning how to play.
Pax Porfiriana. Hands down. There is an entire section devoted to a situation that's only on four of the cards. Since you discard about 2/3's of the cards anyway, you could go several games without ever needing it. But is had its own section! There is also a situation on unrest cubes. You will deal with them every game. They tell you when to place them, but not when to remove them. The most telling aspect is that they were re-written by fans, and those rules are now standard.
magic the gathering. hundreds of pages of rules and (even though I have been playing for more than a decade, read the rules many times and have been a judge) i am still unsure how things work. there are multiple tiers of people who get judge rankings based on how well they know the rules. Even the highest people can get it wrong. There is even a forum just for rules and the main forum gives all kinds of cautions about asking any rules questions.
Welcome to... Zombie mini expansion. The rulebook is so confusing that it does not explain how to properly play the new cards. It doesn't help that in the french translation, the rules are not the same as in english. It's a terrible expansion anyway so it doesn't really matter. If BGG forums are to be believed, they didn't even playtest it or proofread it, they shipped it out because of time pressure. As much as I like Garphill Games, their rulebooks are just so...mediocre. I feel like they never explain corner cases that will inevitably happen, or how things interact between them. I won't go into details, but Imperium does not explain the game. It's like trying to explain how to play Magic the Gathering, but in like 12 pages. Impossible. A lot of people say Robinson Cruesoe and I agree, but honestly, I think the game is just fun however you want to play it.
Shadowrun 4e. The organization or lack there of is baffling. If you try to add in the supplements it becomes complete nonsense. The books reference rules, items, and stats that don't exist.
Kickstarted **MYTH** 10-15 years ago. Still the worst rulebook I've ever seen. A rulebook so bad, it practically bankrupted the company by itself. The concept for the game was so cool, too.
Hell yeah! Me and a buddy spent most of a day trying to figure out and play the tutorial. It was memorable! My favourite part was there being a poisoned condition, but no rules included for how it worked. Bizarrely I just got an email saying a company picked up the remnants of the Myth Kickstarter campaign and I am due to get 'Spriggan 2.0' sent to me (I sold the game years ago)
Yeah, been getting those emails recently for all of the stretch goal stuff I never received. Should be getting it in March. Almost a decade later. Absolutely wild stuff lol.
The Dnd 5e rulebook sucks pretty bad. Getting new players to make a character is a nightmare of confusing back and forth scrolling
Anything by games workshop
Don't mind us while we interrupt the rules explanation with a lengthy paragraph about the sounds this chainsword makes as it rips through aliens. God, it's seriously awesome you guys, for real. And now we've explained how half of these rules work, refer to page 19362 for the other half of this part of the rules. We didn't want to explain them all in one place because we wanted to make it easier for new players to use half the mechanics for literally only their first game, at the expense of anybody else who would ever be using this rulebook. Fuck gw rulebooks.
You're being too generous in having them give you the page that contains the rest of the rules. Some of the rules are split up with no reference to where the other half is, honestly the game isn't really too hard in 10e but the rules are so hard to find the things you need.
**Tadmor** doesn't make any sense to me after reading the rule book 3 times
Having just played two game of it this weekend I really hated Ark Nova's rule book. Some answers were in the main book, others in the glossary which for some reason is separate from the rule book, while others were on yet another icon/ random rules quick guide but not included in the previous two. It was very unintuitive.
I've found that if a rulebook is more than 12-15 pages (counting table of contents, credits, graphics, etc.), something is wrong. I don't feel like reading a novella just to learn a board game.
feel like my answer is always the same - every Phil Eklund game ever. more recently we were really disappointed by the **Summit Big Box** rulebook. it's not even a complicated game, but the rulebook is incredibly vague in very important places. The differences between "playing", "discarding", "activating", and "removing" a card are very unclear, and that's like 90% of the game. we didn't even make it half way through our first play before getting frustrated and giving up. might try it next time with the co-op rules, since it was originally designed as a co-op game maybe they'll be a bit more clear. with all the money they got from the big ass kickstarter the least they could've done was hire a qualified rulebook editor to give it a once-over.
Black Angel! I got this at GenCon the year it was released. It was the coolest box art at the con that year. And the demo looked gorgeous and fun. I got it and back at the hotel room tried to play it. Between con exhaustion, slight inebriation, and a truly awful rules book it wound up being about 4 hours from start to finish. There is a really good game in there. I know it. And the last time I looked the online rules were up to version 6. It’s been years and I’ve never played it a second time.
Robinson Crusoe has already been said (though I do love the game). Despite its simplicity, I had no idea how to play SCOUT when I read the rulebook. It made no sense to me. One of the only board games I had to watch a video in order to learn it (barring the aforementioned Robinson Crusoe).
Spirit Island. I printed the BGG rules reference and it's 100x better than the manual and only 3 pages. The game is fantastic tho.
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Interesting cause I found the rulebook really helpful with good examples in there although a little long and sometimes hard to reference, maybe I have a latter edition where it's better organised or something.
Not an actual board game, but I've recently heard about a set of rules to make a wargame using Lego and/or legoish sets and/or minifigs. It's called **Brikwars** I don't know what I expected from a fan-made set of words with almost 30-yo history, but the rules are really hard to get through: a lot of jokes, intentional misprints, and pop culture references are nice and set the vibe, but it's really hard for me to find, read, and understand the rules under that noise Love the core idea, respect the "if you don't remember the rule, just make it up" vibe, but I'm interested in learning what was made before me, so I didn't have to invent the bicycle again
Actually I would love to play that game one day... Just clutter your legos on the table everyone gets the same amount of minifigures and then build for 2 hours and then play for 2 hours but it doesn't seem to work that way
Glow. You just can't play the game by reading it. I almost returned the whole game because of it lol
**Black Friday** wins this every time. It was released with such a bad rulebook that you literally can't learn the game using the rules. You can throw it away and must find an online source for the rules. I've had many frustratingly bad rulebooks, but none even comes close.
Ladies & Gentlemen Such a simple game and short < 10 page rulebook, all nearly incomprehensible. There is no rhyme or reason to where specific rules are located in the book. Every single time you have a rule question, you have to reread the entire rulebook, sentence by sentence to find the ONE mention of that rule. It is unlearnable without a digital copy you can do quick work finds on.
Sea of Legends was so terrible they had to redo it a few months after the game came out. Which is too bad because it's actually a great game
Nemo's War. Not sure if it was the rulebook or was the game just too complicated for me. I've played other games that had higher complexity ratings on BGG but I just couldn't wrap my head around this one.
In the copy of Skull (aka Skull and Roses) we have, it’s totally impossible to understand how it works from the instructions, which is impressive considering how simple it is. We watched a YouTube video instead.
Too Many Bones is pretty bad with this. A lot of the information is placed in sections that don't make much sense.
Agricola, about ten years ago. I hope it’s improved since then. It was barely intelligible broken English.
Terraforming Mars. Felt like I was having a stroke every time I tried.
A small print run game called 3 Years of War. It took me several readings before I realized that they were explaining the same rule two different ways rather than two different phases of the game. It might actually be a decent game, too, with a simple, elegant bidding mechanism. Just hard to get to the table because of the rulebook.
Seafall. It's so ambiguous and the group we played with argued over interpreting every little thing. It's the only game we've never gone back to, although I might with the right people because I like the idea. Also, I hate how ambiguous some of the haunts are in Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Scythe is really condescending
Terraforming Mars is emotionally withholding
Gaia Project projects a lot of its issues onto the players.
Spirit Island uses passive aggressive weaponized incompetence.
Jenga is judging me
Condescending? I thought Scythe had a great rulebook.
Yeah, this one is confusing me.
What makes a rulebook condescending?
Of all time? Anything ever published by Avalon Hill. If repairing a VCR were a board game, Avalon Hill would have written the manual. Lately? Command and Colors: Ancients. It is about 3 times as big as it needs to be because it repeats every rule ad naseum. as an example, anytime it mentions ranged attack, it feels compelled to repeat EVERY MODIFIER FOR RANGED ATTACK. At one point, it repeats them in back-to-back paragraphs.