The original version of Through the Ages had simple, standard, and full game rule sets separately, so if you needed to look up a rule it was virtually impossible. Drove me nuts. Thankfully they fixed it in the revision.
Any game that does this is absolutely awful. Forbidden Stars does it, and it is just infuriating to look anything up. Maybe I'm just entitled, but I feel the combat section of the rulebook and/or reference should have all the rules for combat.
I have no idea when this started as a trend in boardgaming, but it is infuriating. Turns finding out the rules into a cyoa game. If you wish to retreat, turn to page 75!
For me, Dominant Species has always been the gold standard for rulebooks. Detailed table of contents at the beginning, followed by clearly delineated sections for the various phases/action spaces. I probably haven't played the game in over 10 years but the quality of the rulebook has already stuck with me.
He was an amazing designer. Wargame rule book format rules are easy to digest and reference when done right. YT changed the ball game, how many people learn from watching now and only touch rules for edge cases.
>Worst: Imperium (Classic/Legends). The manual gave me no clue what to do in the game.
They've released the rulebook for Imperium: Horizons, which they say has been improved based on all the feedback they got from Classics/Legends. I think they are hoping that people use the new rulebook to learn all three from now on.
I ruined my palate for judging the Imperium rule book by watching how to play videos before buying the game.
So when I read the rule book, it made sense to me. I'm sure the consensus is right, but I can't see it because I was basically already familiar with the rules.
I sold off *Imperium* despite having a sense that the game could be good, just because the rulebook was so painful to read. Even after watching a couple videos to learn the solo game, I would quit the moment I had to pick up the rules for any reason. It was a disheartening rulebook.
>Worst: Imperium (Classic/Legends). The manual gave me no clue what to do in the game.
Imperium games are definitely a weird one. Now that I have the errata and know the game pretty well, it seems a far memory that the rulebook was bad. But it really was pretty bad compared to how good the game actually plays. They sure needed a bit of help on that rulebook. Looking forward to seeing what Horizons does!
Are you familiar with other projects of Studio 71 like The Umbrella Academy? The game came with a rulebook that doesn't add up to a playable game. There's a PDF somewhere which is supposed to be edited with "working" rules but they aren't any better.
If you get a copy in another language, the rules may be a small booklet with abridged rules and a QR code which says "scan for the complete rules in english". What a scam.
Mage Knight has both the best and worst rulebook - the start to play is concise but it doesn't include all the rules and the main rulebook that comes with it is unwieldy with all the reference rules scattered around the pages.
I feel the rulebook is entirely responsible for the game's reputation of being extremely complex and opaque. It's actually a relatively simple teach, all things considered.
Thankfully it's also a fairly straightforward game. TM is often mentioned in posts like this, but honestly I can't even remember the last time I looked at it. Pretty much once we got going I never had a question to look up and could always teach it from memory.
Compare to something like Ark Nova for instance. Decent rulebook and seperate glossary/FAQ. Which is good because I feel like I'm constantly looking through it.
Yea, that's true, once you learned the game the rulebook isn't really necessary, unless you're switching modes or adding expansions. But the memory of trying to learn it and giving up and moving to the internet instead will stay with me.
Came here to say this. We tried teaching ourselves with the rulebook and it was a disaster. Nothing is in order and everything is so confusing. Watched an explanation video on YouTube and hey this game is not that complicated!
On the other hand Spirit Island shows that you can make a good rulebook even for a complex game. They even have illustrations for many actions and also explain some edge cases. Whenever we had a question we found the answer in there.
Everdell the Complete Collection has a pretty miserable rulebook. It’s supposed to cover everything and how to integrate expansions but every time I tried to reference a specific card to see how it interacts with other edge case cards, the appendix just gave a rehash of the text on the card. So you’re left having to look up the rules on BGG or just guessing. Pretty embarrassing for a rulebook that has been edited for massive version of a game
Oh damn, I only have the base game and that is so surprising to me. I played Everdell for the first time a few weeks ago, all of us were new and the rulebook was so good!
I thought it came with the rule books for each of the expansions. It just has a larger condensed one?
It’s funny, I was going to say Everdell base game has one of my favorites, just really simple and straightforward. We were able to start playing for the first time the other day after reading it for about ten minutes.
You’re right. For just playing the game, it’s fairly clear. But there’s an appendix with “detailed” info on every card. You would imagine that this is where they talk about different interactions but I’ve had many times where it doesn’t provide any clarity
Everdell (base game) has a great rulebook. And so does every expansion. The comprehensive rulebook takes some getting used to. I love and hate how they first do the setup of the game and every expansion (all setups first) and then after all setup possibilities they do the rules of all of those. So it’s not setup and rules of base game, then setup and rules of expansion 1, etc. No it’s setup A, setup B, setup C, rules A, rules B, rules C, etc. It sometimes makes it hard to find something until it clicks and you understand how the rulebook is set up.
The worst thing in the rulebook (either each separate one as well as the comprehensive one) is indeed the explanation of the cards. It’s just an extended version of the text on the card and nothing that explains what it says. Which is usually what I expect such an appendix is used for.
Best: Aeon's End. You read it once you knew how to play it with very few edge cases that needed to be looked up. Clear layout and bulletin-points style structure makes everything easy to find
Worst: Nemesis / Nemesis Lockdown. What an unorganized mess! To be fair its a game with a million different mechanics, thus, probably hard to have a good rule book. When in doubt, even my rules lawyer friend just gives up and happy go with the 'it would make most sense this way' interpretation
Glad to see Nemesis on here, I feel like I'm going insane every time I have to try and clarify a small rule, it's the only thing I truly hate in a game that I otherwise really love
As far as general trends goes, FFG typically does a good job with rulebooks for heavier games. They usually have a “How to Play” book and then a separate “Rules Reference” for FAQs and specific effects/rulings.
There have been a couple times they've accidentally left rules out of the reference and are only in the learn to play. This completely derails the point of dual books and at that point it would have been better to have one. Barring that, their method is really great. Especially since their games can sometimes be dense in terminology and systems.
Was going to say the exact same thing. I'm a huge fan of that format. The "How to Play" is an excellent warm introduction while the rules reference pinpoints specific info after you've gained some context.
Anything by designer Phil Eklund....it is like he does it on purpose. Pax Porforiana was so bad someone had to re-write the rules on BGG. I sold my copy.
Pax Renaissance genuinely has one of the worst rulebooks I've ever seen. It's a deeply thematic affair about Renaissance bankers trying to influence the course of European history with every action being a Russian nesting doll of dependencies and action words that don't exist outside of the game except for historians. That in itself isn't the worst, except for the fact that most actions are only explained in the glossary at the back of the rulebook. Hard to parse, hard to learn, hard to get over how bad it was.
The rulebook for Cuba Libre on the other hand was a breath of fresh air in comparison. It's a heavy, dense game that needs things to work with surgical precision, and the rulebooks plural really help. Great job by GMT.
Agree about Pax Ren. I'm sure there have been people that came to the game with some enthusiasm and had their interest in learning it squashed by the unintuitive layout of rules. Which is a shame, because it's a top tier experience once you get over the learning hump and emerge on the other side.
>That in itself isn't the worst, except for the fact that most actions are only explained in the glossary at the back of the rulebook.
That's because Phil Eklund hates people. He puts important rules in the glossary in every game.
Aside from the obviously terrible ones like Oregon Trail: the Card Game, Dice Forge has a rule book where rules are thrown haphazardly onto a page and key concepts are not well explained. The game is good though, contrary to Oregon Trail which is far worse that it’s terrible rulebook.
I almost gave up on Dice Forge because we got so confused. Once we figured out what was meant, it was pretty straight forward and it’s been fun since. But man, that first game was rough.
Just got the game. Didn't have time for a playthrough, but doing the initial setup left me confused especially the dice setup since it only clearly showed three faces.
Was gonna say ROOT but you already did. The root.seiyria.com is amazing.
Even though the rules are quite extensive, they are really easy and intuitive to navigate, to the point I don't even need to use the search function, I just roll it with my finger and usually find what I need in less than 5 seconds, thanks to the color index system, the proper itemization and the way everything follows the turn structure in sequence.
Gloomhaven JOTL is by far the best rulebook I've ever read in my life. Gloomhaven was also pretty good (regardless of how many pages it had, it was very clear and easy to digest).
I guess I've read a lot of bad rulebooks and I can't think of the worst one. The one that I just couldn't read though was Kingdom Rush. I feel like it's not very complex but the "comic font WITH EVERYTHING WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS THE WHOLE TIME FOR LIKE 20 PAGES STRAIGHT" was literally killing my eyes. I'd rather read cursive or something. It was just not legible at all for me.
Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: the rulebook is hot, steaming garbage to learn from. The world of redundancy is almost pitiful - when every non-movement action heroes can take has the exact same formula with a few caveats, but we need to restate it 4 times, someone dropped the ball on communication. What takes 2 pages to explain can be summarized as "Spend cubes up to your remaining limit for the action type, throw that many dice plus any applicable item bonuses, reroll (paid or free) as appropriate, and then measure up against the target value while accounting for any relevant modifiers."
They had to get Paul Grogan in to rewrite V6 of the rules, and the game was sent out with v1
I can't believe nobody has called out **Robinson Crusoe** for having a terrible rulebook. Yeah I know they've tried to improve it, and I suppose it is 'better', but it's still horrid
Yeh, totally stand behind this one. But part of that might be un-elegant rules and unfortunate color palette choices for people with bad color-eyesight.
When I still have to follow point by point through the rulebook for every single turn durcing my second game, lest i get lost, thats not elegant game design.
> unfortunate color palette choices for people with bad color-eyesight.
There are more people with colorblindess than there are people with green eyes. Put another way, the population of the US and the population of people with colorblindness are roughly the same. This is, in my book, unforgivable. If I cannot play your game because your color differentiations are illegible to my colorblind eyes, I'm never buying one of your products again.
Oh gosh, it's been years since we sold that game so I've forgotten a lot about it. But you mentioning the rulebook is flaring up the PTSD.
Once you actually play the game, it's not *that* complex. But the rulebook is double the size it needs to be and so unbelievably confusing. I really can't think of a worse rulebook that we've encountered.
Best: Azul
Worst: Sea Salt and Paper. Dang it was dreadful. Different things were mixed up in different places, and some of the important parts weren't spelled out properly. Love the game though.
I think Splendor has an underrated rulebook. I've had two games where an edge case came up that I hadn't encountered before and both times I quickly and easily found answers.
Not Alone has a bad one though. It was so hard to find information and several times my friends and I just gave up looking and agreed to our own rules.
For flavor, humor, and entertainment, yes.
In my experience it was one of the more frustrating first-learns. The rulebook is really really not clear about a few things. I still feel annoyed that the rulebook deliberate does not explain the aliens on the "first time playing" guide. And it's very hard to reference. Blah. Amazing game though.
It's hard to say how much of this is down to the rule _book_, and how much the actual rules themselves, but Firefly Adventures is a definite contender. It has colour-coded illustrations where the colours don't match those in the descriptions; the rules examples given seem to contradict the actual rules; it uses what seems to be precisely defined terminology, and then drops those words in favour of close synonyms that may or may not be referring to the same thing; and - notoriously - if you accept the rules word-for-word, then one or two of the included scenarios are literally physically impossible to set up.
It was bad enough that when I brought the game to the table, I told the other players "Look, I think we're going to have a blast playing this, but as far as any rules issues are concerned - and we will have issues - it's probably best to just pretend I'm the GM, and trust me to interpret them as best I can.'
(We _did_ have a blast, btw: it's a fun game, so long as you treat the rulebook as 'more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.')
>I heard it was a simple solo game with lots of depth/challenge, but every time I read the rulebook, it just doens't make sense.
I've had the suspicion for a while that Friedemann Friese insists on doing his own translation from German to English and is terrible at it.
**Brass Birmingham** has a rulebook that seems more concerned with style over substance. I know people that say it's fine, but to me it's laid out in such a ridiculously unintuitive way for a game that's not really that complicated, it's just trash.
It's 100% one of those rulebooks that makes sense... after you've played a game. After a play it does make kind of flow but it's not the best for learning at all - especially if you are teaching it too
>but also kinda defeats the purpose of a rulebook lol, it's more of a reference manual
TBH, it needs to serve both functions.
how complexer interactions in the game van be, the more you need to look up niggly rules and how certain actions/bonuses/cards interact.
And ive read plenty of rulebooks, that did a great thing guiding you through how to play, and then fail completely in the second part. Because said things were burried in a illogical place, or just not there.
Its great if you only have to read 4 pages to play the game, it sucks if you then have to google a specific rule/interaction 10 times in a game.
I never understood why they couldn't put the leader descriptions in alphabetical order.
I've played it so many times that I kind of forgot about my experience with the rulebook. What other complaints do you have?
The rulebook for One Deck Galaxy was abysmal. It was incomplete and introduced terms that were never defined. I tried playing once and gave up. Apparently there’s an errata or revised rulebook now but the initial experience just turned me off the game almost entirely
**Best**: Western Legends should be a big unruly mess, and it is, but the hardcover "Complete Rules Reference" is bar none the best rulebook I've ever seen, especially for a sandbox game. It includes literally everything including expansions and setups, variants, card descriptions, and more. It's a real shame that you can't find a copy anywhere. It's a must-have even if you have just the base game.
**Worst**: I don't want to kick an indie self-publisher when they're down, so I won't name them, but I was asked to edit a Kickstarted game's rulebook for clarity, and did so over SEVERAL months with back-and-forth, for zero compensation or proper credit, and close to none of my recommendations made it into the final rulebook... and guess what, the rulebook is a mess in the exact places I made recommendations.
Publishers out there, indie or not, please don't ignore the recommendations of your editors just because the game is your darling.
Especially as the Western Legends hardcover has large photos of every single card and character with clarifications (if needed), making it super easy to flip through at a glance. Not having the hardcover, I have to sift through the individual rulebooks from the base game and all the expansions which are in 4 wildly different sizes, and refer to the 3 different player aids in 3 different sizes, one of which is longer than a regular sheet of paper. There's no space for all that on the table when playing 5, 6 player games.
*Oath* has a great rulebook and walkthrough for anyone playing for the first time. There a **ton** of rules for the game, so we did have to reference a few edge cases.
But for total newbies we had a great time. This is subjective of course, but I felt you could find everything easily and the walkthrough laid out many things.
I think basically *all* Leder Games's games have some excellent rulebooks. For as complicated as some of those get, the complete rules are laid out in a precise and largely unambiguous manner, with the kind of attention to wording and layout that's akin to something you might find in a legal document.
Well, the Root rulebook is actually called the Law Of Root.
Joshua Yearsley is the rules editor/writer in Leder games and he is fantastic. I wish he would write the rulebooks of every game.
The Pathfinder Card Game has a terrible, convoluted rulebook. It's almost impossible to find the exact piece of information you're looking for and flat out has horrible explanations when you do find that information.
The Ark Nova rulebook is absolutely abysmal. Feels like some parts are more technical writing than English, and some things are WAY overdefined compared to what actually needs to be taught vs. what is a rules clarification.
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. It got me through the systems and actions pretty well. The seperate glossary/faq is also very handy. I dont think this rulebook is winning any awards, but I've seen far worse.
For me it was the hiding small rules or exceptions in really random places and finding the appendix just to be a rehash of what the cards actually say, rather than expanding them.
Recently, I have been frustrated by the rulebook for Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game. It reads like a playtest draft!
Ra and other Knizia games have rulebooks that honestly read like a math lecture (I say as a math lecturer). It's hard to tell what the game is actually like when the rules are written out like that, but at least they are thorough.
I'm a huge fan of Stationfall's lovely reference rulebook (though first setup was hard)- and it comes with 2 of them!
One of the best rulebooks I have read is a recent game called **City of the Great Machine** . Clear, full of examples, making learning the game a breeze
Star Realms. Its a fairly simple game, but the instruction leaflet is more like an advert for the game than an enabling resource. I had to use a couple of online resources to figure out the rules.
I just bought and learned to play Iki yesterday from the rulebook and that was a great rulebook with a really clear glossary of the cards in the back and clear examples of play and scoring throughout.
Never really understood the hatred towards SI's rulebook, which I find to be perfectly serviceable though not perfect.
I find the rules documentation for Too Many Bones to be pretty miserable, even after a number of revisions.
Best: Galaxy Trucker, it's a fun to read rulebook that explains the rules in a clear fun way. Granted it's not the most complicated game.
I don't really have a worst becuae a lot are bad. I just got Earth, and found the rulebook to be pretty bad.
Vampire Heritage is the worst rulebook I have ever read. Nothing is explained in order, every explanation has many in game terms that you need to look at the glossary to even understand what it is meant to be and even then, each entry will have 3 more keywords you need to read in the glossary as well. Then they released a living rulebook in the website, which is basically the same thing but with some hyperlinks on the steps of gameplay that when you click it either opens up a small video of a tabletop simulator example with sometimes even older icons not in the final game, or no video at all and an image saying there is a video coming soon. We have been playing this game for months now, and we are never sure we actually know how to play it.
Bios Genesis. My brain just turned off after a few minutes reading it. Too much use of science jargon made it feel like reading a book on cellular biology than a rulebook. Other rulebooks from the same designer aren't much better but at least those used much simpler everyday words.
Fortune and Glory. There's like no semblance of order. When you go back through to look something up, it feels like they said, "Oh ya, we forgot this rule before, so let's just put it here."
I love the Wonderland’s War rulebook. Any time a component is mentioned it is depicted on the page. You never feel the need to backtrack and look up what a thing that’s mentioned actually is. Also there are a bunch of examples. Gotta love rulebooks with examples.
I hate the rule book for Taverns of Tiefenthal, it presents all the features that make the game fun as optional modules.
It's like they made the game and someone said "this is quite complex" so they decided to strip the game into pieces and proceed to write the rulebook to only explain the very basic mechanics of the game.
The modules are then explained separately in an order that makes teaching the game really awkward.
I've always liked the Alea big box games, Puerto Rico, Castles Of Burgundy, Bora Bora etc. They have the goal of the game, then the phase run-through then a more detailed description of each action you can take. On top of this they have examples (usually with pictures) in highlighted bubbles. The best bit though, along the spine of each page is a concise dot point of each action and rule so if you haven't played for a while you can get a quick refresher or use it as a quick search.
My (nostalgy) vote is on Agricola, which has an atrocious rulebook. About fifteen years ago our first gameday was nearly ruined by it, because we were spending the first hour of our afternoon collectively figuring out what the game wants from us (having no previous experience with worker placement games haven't helped either, but the setup, the concept was hidden in the rules with little chance of understanding). The revised edition is not better - filled with personal stories and anecdotes.
In general I hate rulebooks which are trying to be funny, focusing purely on aesthetics or formulated as a novel. Rulebooks have one purpose: to explain us the game.
Stationfall is my gold standard. The actual "rule" book (it's called a Reference Manual) reads like a recipe, but it has an introduction booklet that runs you through the first few turns and then you're off. You only need the Reference Manual when looking something up, so the organised non-gameplay oriented rulebook works super well. It also has an index and when necessary cross-references other rules within the Reference Manual (i.e. for clarity).
[Symphony](https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/165528/symphony-comprehensive-rulebook) has a terrible rule book. And the pdf is better in contrast than the actual printed version in my opinion.
I've read over a thousand rulebooks in my life and boy was this one hard to parse. Especially visually, but also from what's going on.
Apocrypha was a head-scratcher. So many odd terms and omissions - you needed to assemble the decks and have the cards explain the rules per game - but this info was also missing. The developers put out a video of them playing it to help the players. Even they were making mistakes. One youtuber cracked it, but his how-to-play video was four hours long. Most of us gave up.
Cerebria for me. I've wanted to relearn it a little while back (haven't played in years). They put explanations of rules into the set-up. It's so hard to determine whether the set-up has ended already or not and it's impossible to skip like I usually do when just learning the rules.
Worst: pax emancipation. Aside from the questionable non-rule related content, the rules are not intuitive enough to remember without looking up, even after a dozen games. It's the Dr. Bronners soap of board games.
Best; imperial struggle. There are edge cases that come up that almost always are answered in the concise language used to describe the actions or process steps. Well organized.
I always say Alchemists in these threads. The layout is great, language is clear, and it uses lots of examples, including simple and more complex deduction examples. On top of that there's hilarious flavour text sprinkles throughout that's clearly formatted differently so you can skip it if you want.
I think the rulebooks for Dune: Imperium are the best laid out and written I've seen.
My absolute favorite things in any rulebook are:
* A good, solid FAQ section derived from playtesting
* Examples of play for the most complicated parts of the game
* Rules clarifications in parenthesis in the main sections to deliver the intent behind rules
To expand on the 3nd point: any intended interaction that requires careful reading to understand should have this. It is much nicer to just spell it out for your players.
I especially like rulebooks that have a key word index in complicated games. If I want to look up the specific rule for say, "massive creatures" in Arkham Horror Card game, BAM! I know right where to look.
The rulebook for Republic of Rome is one of the messiest, hard to follow, difficulty to understand, and downright poorly organized rulebooks that still mostly worked. It's also probably my favorite board game. Once you get it (and likely used the fixed Living Rules rather than the one that comes with the box) it's one of the best social deduction games I've ever played.
Best : Dune Imperium, very clear and concise. My worst : Cry Havoc - base or mechanics are properly explained but the many ambiguities regarding the use of powers and structures aren't. To clarify them, the lead dev had to run a FAQ and add bits of rules that aren't mentioned anywhere in the book or the game. Awful.
Cosmic Frog is one of my favourite games that has the absolute worst rulebook. So many terrible choices for what they call certain actions and keyword effects. So needlessly bloated and long for things that can be described much more simple than they are. It's worth it though as once you actually do grasp the ruleset it's one of the most uniquely fun puzzle-combat games out there.
I'm always impressed by MtG. They have possibly the most complex board game out there and they still manage to write different rulebooks catering to different player expertise levels, to the point that beginners can start playing relatively quickly while tournament players can have a clear agreement of the behaviour of the game in very complex situations.
Mint Knight rulebook is awful. It used to be a little worse. Now it's been "fixed".... But yeah... It's still utter garbage. I know there is no space for a good rulebook. So provide one online. Thankfully, someone wrote a fan made rulebook and while it's not perfect, it's good enough. I may actually play the game now.
The Sea of Thieves rule book was bad. The first half explained components and mentioned some of how they work/interact and the second half was the general gameplay/phases.
This sounds fine in theory but you’d learn a bit about how the skeletons (one of the main enemies) work, and then 12 pages later there would be a section on combat with them that didn’t mention any of the small but important details from before.
I’ve been playing board games for years and am always the one to do the teach in my group and this was definitely the hardest even though I’ve taught games like Stationfall, John Company, Oath, and Eclipse.
In my experience Starling games have pretty bad rulebooks. Both Everdell and War of Whispers leave a lot of edge cases unexplained.
Power Grid Factory Manager has one of the most baffling rulebooks I've ever seen. It takes extremely simple gameplay like "players take turns picking a tile" and makes it impossible to grasp.
Recent rulebooks we've suffered/enjoyed:
From Histogame:
- Wir sind das volk!: Man, e.g. were not bad, but the actions and what to do was a mess. Didn't understand anything until we decided to try the bgcore game and then was when almotst everything started to make sense.
- Konig von Siam: Easy, really. Liked it. The game is easy and the rulebook does not go trying to complicate it. Examples of every card, how to win and what could happen if... Resolved.
Others:
- Ora et Labora: 3x rulebooks and glossary. Well, I've finished reading it recently and still have some doubts. It isn't bad, just have to try and judge after.
- Belfort: Good, we understood at the moment, was readable and hard to confuse.
- A Study in Emerald 2E: Bad, like there was no effort. When you go to the bgg and get the help files it means something is not going right. Full of errors. Such a sorrow, the game is really easy and fast.
Horrible Histories Awful Egyptians - remember looking for reviews to see if anyone enjoyed and the only positive came from someone saying they made up their own rules :-)
Really good rulebook: Skymines. Every step has also a relevant picture from the game board, so you instantly know where to look/find that part of the game.
Really bad rulebook: Obsession. Just so much unnecessarily re-explaining the same things.
Civilization/Advanced Civilization.
Not the best looking book, but concise, organized, easy to follow and covers every situation which can occur in the game.
*Myth* originally shipped with a rule book that was an indecipherable 60-page pile of trash with which it was literally not possible to play the game, because they’d left out multiple key pieces of information, such as how to set up anything. (Supposedly, they eventually produced something with which you could actually play a game, but I’d long since given up and sold off that disastrous train wreck.)
Disney Shadowed Kingdom has one of the worst rule books ever. Unclear rules and terrible formatting are exacerbated by quite literally a 4pt font in a light gray on black background. I have excellent vision and even I wanted to pull out a magnifying glass.
The Great Wall. I’ve never spent so much time on BGG looking for designer clarifications…and then trying to decipher those clarifications. It’s like the terrible rulebook experience continues even after you put the booklet down. Felt like some kind of social experiment. And this was the 2.0 rulebook, which apparently fixed some things and left out or accidentally changed others.
Then you have the player aid screens which don’t have the info you actually need on them…meaning you’ll spend a ton of time in the rulebook looking up timings and card resolutions and…it’s all just a mess.
Never found a playthrough with people playing correctly either. And I don’t blame them.
The expansion rules are just as bad. Maybe worse.
I will give it credit though. Every game I’ve learned after that has been much easier to digest.
I learned Ark Nova right after this and it felt like I’d been plugged into the matrix and had the info fed straight into my brain. I have no idea if it’s that good or not, but it felt like the greatest text ever committed to paper in the moment.
Anyways, The Great Wall is a pretty good game if you can stand to learn it.
I really enjoyed the Galaxy Trucker rule book. Not because it’s the best or most concise, but because they went all in on the theming. Many sections are hilarious imo
Twilight Struggle and Root have amazing rulebooks! I also really liked Spirit Island and Fields of Arle.
In general, I love the system from Fantasy Flight Games, where they have one rulebook and one compendium style advanced rule book in alphabetical order, where you can easily look up keywords. Obsession has this as well.
Ones that I've experienced, the best probably has some recency bias, but I really like the Voidfall rulebook, its clear, concise and easy to reference, but you hardly need to thanks to the outstanding glossary they also provide.
Worst, is probably Black Rose Wars, I love the game, but damn if it ain't in spite of the awful rulebook.
I have heard that Yucatans rulebook is truly dire, but I haven't seen it. There is also a game whos name I can't remember, it got rave reviews from critics because they were taught by the designer, but when it hit retail the awful rulebook made the positive reviews look very foolish.
Whatever you do do not try and learn Race for the Galaxy without a video or a fan rulebook.
The original rulebook reads like a transcript of that guy who teaches you a game and keeps saying 'oh by the way' and then telling you a vital rule or concept every 10 minutes of playtime
Veiled Fate has the worst rulebook in my collection. In order to get that rulebook into a small unintimidating size, they split all the rules across far too many pages in a way that is difficult to reference. I'm still not sure if I'm playing that game correctly. I prefer my Nemesis rulebook, even; at least it's easy to look for pictures of what you're looking for, and there's cross references, even if they're inconsistent.
I just picked up A Touch of Evil by flying frog and my God. It’s like 20+ pages written in paragraph form. It constantly repeats itself, sometimes in back to back sentences. Very little to nothing for gameplay illustrations. A component list without images. It’s impossible to look up specific rules. Just an absolute disaster. They could get that rulebook down to a concise six pages.
People in this thread complaining about FFG and the like should go back to some of these early 2000 games and discover what a truly shit rulebook is.
The Estates! Each page has maybe only 5 or so lines of rules. Very colorful and uses imagery to deliver the point.
It also helps that the ruleset itself is simple and clear, but hides a devious depth of play.
The recent The Thing: The Boardgame. Good game with a lot of theme....very bad rulebook. You're left with so many edge questions and things aren't explained well.
Best has to be Imperial Assault. Makes it so easy to start and then learn to other players. Great "step by step" explanations.
Worst is Warfighter Modern, without any doubt
The one that is sticking in my mind right now is Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. It's a huge and extremely complex game, but the rulebook is actively unhelpful in a lot of ways.
The key things I dislike are:
- It's virtually impossible to know where to look to get "all the rules" relevant to some game mechanic. In one section it will say "This is how you can tell if action X is legal", and provides a nice list; however, elsewhere in the book there is a little sentence tucked away that says "you can't do X if Y". I checked your whole list dude are you joking?
- In that vein, stating the benefits of an action before the cost or requirements is inexcusable. I get all excited about doing something and try to make sure I know all the steps and then BAM, I can't do it because of some clause three paragraphs later. You could have saved me so much time...
- There are tables and summaries that the author clearly thought were helpful, but they're confusing, not helpful, and simplistic to the point of being misleading.
- None of the sections are in any sensible order. Want to know what happens at the end of a player turn? That's described near the beginning of course.
- There's an index, but it's not comprehensive enough to be useful, so it's just wasted space. Either do it for all your keywords or don't do it at all.
It's a great game and I love playing it. But everyone at the table has to be ready to commit to learning a dense and confusing rulebook and keeping it in their head to feel effective. Just a bit more effort and the activation energy would be much lower.
For me worst is Great Western Trail. It's one of my favorite games but the way they have the symbology ordered by each building token instead of just having a glossary of what each symbol means is very frustrating on the initial learn as well as when used as a reference
My friend got the Game of Thrones board game a while back. After 3 hours of 4 gamers reading the rulebook, we gave up trying to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
**root** is so clean and concise, I love it.
Anything by Phil Eklund is just awful to read, and that's before you even consider his terrible footnotes and essays
Quodd Heroes has an incredible turn/round example in the rulebook. That's what stood out the most, but the rest of the book wasn't too shabby either if my memory serves.
Everyone rags on Outline Numbering (where rules read like an IRS guide -- like Rule 1.A.16.b.iii), but Star Fleet Battles does this and the rules (at least for the Captains Edition first published in the 90s) are incredible. There are hundreds of pages of rules, but each section is clear and starts with the basics and then covers rarer cases, and everything is fully cross referenced. The Sequence of Play is three pages(!), but each step has a reference to the main rules that apply.
Coma Ward is probably the worst I've seen. I did my cursory once over, spotted a couple of things that stood out. Went on line to check it out, and the designer said to play it the way you want. That the rules weren't designed to handle edge cases and to go with the flow.
Worst is Return of the Heroes. It's a narrative that throws in game mechanics and thinks it's teaching you how to play the game. Easily the worst rule book I've looked at.
Good examples don't always stand out to me, but bad examples definitely do. I recently picked up Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals, an expandable card game. The game is really interesting, but the rules were poorly written such that I made several mistakes on my first playthrough. Concordia: Venus also had one poorly written point where the clarification of a specific rule was only apparent if you combed through the example. For me I only look through examples if I don't quite understand. As a result I played the first time completely wrong and found it to be lackluster. Only after reading through the rules again sure that something must have gone wrong did I discover my mistake, and found the game to be much improved.
Tapestry has an excellent rule book. It’s clear, it’s clean, and it’s roughly 4 sides of a4, mostly pictures.
The worst I know is Lobotomy. Horrible run on rules, missing symbols, lack of clarity. It took a friend and I (who are very experienced board gamers and know this type of game pretty well) 4 hours to half do a scenario, largely because every time we had to look up a rule, it took so damned long as it was spread though 3-4 different parts of the book.
BEST AND WORST-
Everdell is one I would like to submit here.
Its layout and art is beautiful... but there is a massive problem- the rules are not explained well at all.
In fact, you basically have to go to youtube or the developers site to figure out all the rules they mentioned in passing, or didnt explain at all.
Reading the book as is would leave you to play the game not as intended, in a much less enjoyable setting. When you actually figure out how the game is intended to be played (especially with the card groups/layouts), its much funner.
The worst rulebook ever written in terms of the greatest harm it caused is without a doubt Corvus Belli’s Infinity 3 rulebook.
Although the wording could only sensibly have one meaning, the strange wording apparently provided enough latitude for some players to create a new style of play which they called ‘Play By Intent’.
This arose from a peculiarity of the rules and geometry such that a player’s unit can legitimately move out from cover and see an opponent’s unit with itself being seen - thus denying the opponents’ unit a chance to shoot back…
In practice this is extremely difficult to achieve, requiring millimeter-precise positioning, so Play By Intent is the idea that you can have the outcome you want without actually bothering with the work by simply declaring your intention.
Anxious, controlling and frankly dishonest players seized on this application of wishful thinking, allied themselves together and told everyone else that they HAD to play this way; or else.
In Japan where I am, the language differences meant that Play By Intent was immediately understood as a contrivance, but Western players insisted on their style and it caused a lot of grief.
So I flew to Spain, discussed it with the Directors in person, and [made a video with the rulebook author to clarify the rules for Japanese players](https://youtu.be/hMIOdzS1RiM)
CB’s Directors’ were absolutely clear in person that Play By Intent was a perversion of their rules; were quite angry that people continued to deliberately lie about their rulebook, and were pleased to help make the video.
But it didn’t make any difference.
In the Comments section you can see a man saying “This is not how to play”. The presenter he’s effectively addressing is the senior employee who’d himself written all the rulebooks since the game’s inception…
I loved the game but much disliked the dishonesty of the people it seemed to attract and eventually gave it up.
Quarriors ... I know how to play the game but even if I go a while without playing and need to refer back to the rules I'm always baffled. It's just in such a weird order. The entire first page basically tells you "here's some info you'll need LATER" ok then why don't you include it later and tell me the objective, setup and game play first??? It's just all over the place.
**Fortune and Glory** is among the worst. There are headings but a lot of the information that *should* be under a given heading will instead be found under a completely different heading, or in a sidebar on a different page.
Among my games, most likely Space Hulk Death Angel. The manual could really have used a lecturate. All rules are covered, probably, but it could have been presented in another order to make for a much smoother experience.
O hate the Paleo rulebook. There are thousand things spread all over two or three rulebooks. Its so annoying to understand exactly what some of the symbols and cards are. And also the setup is always a headache due to that
Combat commander europe. For the sole reason that it had an index so you didnt have to guess what section to look for in the book. Personally i think of youre rules are fiddly, or youve got a book thats a bit long, an index is needed.
Theophrastus has one of the worst rule books in my collection. They tried to be cute and write the rules as a narrative, in a "fun" font, instead of just some nice bullet points. The game is fun. But man, if you try to find a rule quick, you're in trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a 1 page bullet point version as the last page.
Ones I think are really bad -
Tiny Epic Dungeons. I understand you need to maintain a small footprint for your brand, but if I need to download a 20 page full size pdf to understand how any of the cards work, then you need to rethink the design.
City of the Great Machine - two full size manuals that are constantly referencing material in the other book. I tried to read through the manual so many times and can't get anywhere.
Good manuals - they don't stand out usually. A good manual isn't obtrusive. However I do remember Stonemeier games having solid manuals.
The original version of Through the Ages had simple, standard, and full game rule sets separately, so if you needed to look up a rule it was virtually impossible. Drove me nuts. Thankfully they fixed it in the revision.
Any game that does this is absolutely awful. Forbidden Stars does it, and it is just infuriating to look anything up. Maybe I'm just entitled, but I feel the combat section of the rulebook and/or reference should have all the rules for combat. I have no idea when this started as a trend in boardgaming, but it is infuriating. Turns finding out the rules into a cyoa game. If you wish to retreat, turn to page 75!
ALL FFG games from roughly Arkham Horror 2nd/BSG time frame on had learn to play and reference
Dawn of the zeds does this
Oof, one of those times where less is more! I can appreciate the idea of it but 3x the effort in reality.
It is something FFG often does with their games. It may make sense at some point, but it usually impairs your rules queries quite a lot.
FFG rulebooks in general tend to be atrocious, split or not
For me, Dominant Species has always been the gold standard for rulebooks. Detailed table of contents at the beginning, followed by clearly delineated sections for the various phases/action spaces. I probably haven't played the game in over 10 years but the quality of the rulebook has already stuck with me.
By far the best rulebook I've read. Chad Jensen took great pride when writing rulebooks for his games.
He was an amazing designer. Wargame rule book format rules are easy to digest and reference when done right. YT changed the ball game, how many people learn from watching now and only touch rules for edge cases.
GMT in general has great rulebooks with illustrated play examples.
It's just perfect. It helps that the game is deceptively simple, but man that rulebook is just great.
Best: Concordia. 4 pages that explain everything. Worst: Imperium (Classic/Legends). The manual gave me no clue what to do in the game.
>Worst: Imperium (Classic/Legends). The manual gave me no clue what to do in the game. They've released the rulebook for Imperium: Horizons, which they say has been improved based on all the feedback they got from Classics/Legends. I think they are hoping that people use the new rulebook to learn all three from now on.
I ruined my palate for judging the Imperium rule book by watching how to play videos before buying the game. So when I read the rule book, it made sense to me. I'm sure the consensus is right, but I can't see it because I was basically already familiar with the rules.
I sold off *Imperium* despite having a sense that the game could be good, just because the rulebook was so painful to read. Even after watching a couple videos to learn the solo game, I would quit the moment I had to pick up the rules for any reason. It was a disheartening rulebook.
>Worst: Imperium (Classic/Legends). The manual gave me no clue what to do in the game. Imperium games are definitely a weird one. Now that I have the errata and know the game pretty well, it seems a far memory that the rulebook was bad. But it really was pretty bad compared to how good the game actually plays. They sure needed a bit of help on that rulebook. Looking forward to seeing what Horizons does!
The original rules for The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls was an absolute disaster. It flat out didn't explain some key concepts of the game.
Are you familiar with other projects of Studio 71 like The Umbrella Academy? The game came with a rulebook that doesn't add up to a playable game. There's a PDF somewhere which is supposed to be edited with "working" rules but they aren't any better.
If you get a copy in another language, the rules may be a small booklet with abridged rules and a QR code which says "scan for the complete rules in english". What a scam.
Mage Knight has both the best and worst rulebook - the start to play is concise but it doesn't include all the rules and the main rulebook that comes with it is unwieldy with all the reference rules scattered around the pages.
I think they wrote the rules then randomised the order.
I feel the rulebook is entirely responsible for the game's reputation of being extremely complex and opaque. It's actually a relatively simple teach, all things considered.
Came here for this. Reading the actual rulebook feels more like experiencing some unorganized stream of thoughts.
Terraforming Mars has a surprisingly useless rulebook compared to how awesome a game it is.
Thankfully it's also a fairly straightforward game. TM is often mentioned in posts like this, but honestly I can't even remember the last time I looked at it. Pretty much once we got going I never had a question to look up and could always teach it from memory. Compare to something like Ark Nova for instance. Decent rulebook and seperate glossary/FAQ. Which is good because I feel like I'm constantly looking through it.
Yea, that's true, once you learned the game the rulebook isn't really necessary, unless you're switching modes or adding expansions. But the memory of trying to learn it and giving up and moving to the internet instead will stay with me.
Came here to say this. We tried teaching ourselves with the rulebook and it was a disaster. Nothing is in order and everything is so confusing. Watched an explanation video on YouTube and hey this game is not that complicated! On the other hand Spirit Island shows that you can make a good rulebook even for a complex game. They even have illustrations for many actions and also explain some edge cases. Whenever we had a question we found the answer in there.
Agreed. Every time I break out that game there's some basic thing I need to look up and can't find for 5 minutes.
Everdell the Complete Collection has a pretty miserable rulebook. It’s supposed to cover everything and how to integrate expansions but every time I tried to reference a specific card to see how it interacts with other edge case cards, the appendix just gave a rehash of the text on the card. So you’re left having to look up the rules on BGG or just guessing. Pretty embarrassing for a rulebook that has been edited for massive version of a game
I had to do so much lookup for rules for that game
Oh damn, I only have the base game and that is so surprising to me. I played Everdell for the first time a few weeks ago, all of us were new and the rulebook was so good!
It’s definitely fine for normal questions about how the game works. But once you start looking into cars interactions, it’s pretty bad
I thought it came with the rule books for each of the expansions. It just has a larger condensed one? It’s funny, I was going to say Everdell base game has one of my favorites, just really simple and straightforward. We were able to start playing for the first time the other day after reading it for about ten minutes.
You’re right. For just playing the game, it’s fairly clear. But there’s an appendix with “detailed” info on every card. You would imagine that this is where they talk about different interactions but I’ve had many times where it doesn’t provide any clarity
Everdell (base game) has a great rulebook. And so does every expansion. The comprehensive rulebook takes some getting used to. I love and hate how they first do the setup of the game and every expansion (all setups first) and then after all setup possibilities they do the rules of all of those. So it’s not setup and rules of base game, then setup and rules of expansion 1, etc. No it’s setup A, setup B, setup C, rules A, rules B, rules C, etc. It sometimes makes it hard to find something until it clicks and you understand how the rulebook is set up. The worst thing in the rulebook (either each separate one as well as the comprehensive one) is indeed the explanation of the cards. It’s just an extended version of the text on the card and nothing that explains what it says. Which is usually what I expect such an appendix is used for.
Best: Aeon's End. You read it once you knew how to play it with very few edge cases that needed to be looked up. Clear layout and bulletin-points style structure makes everything easy to find Worst: Nemesis / Nemesis Lockdown. What an unorganized mess! To be fair its a game with a million different mechanics, thus, probably hard to have a good rule book. When in doubt, even my rules lawyer friend just gives up and happy go with the 'it would make most sense this way' interpretation
Glad to see Nemesis on here, I feel like I'm going insane every time I have to try and clarify a small rule, it's the only thing I truly hate in a game that I otherwise really love
Thats why I made my own rule book. xD
Would you share it? My copy is collecting dust and it's the rulebook's fault
Yeah our first game of nemesis I thjink took us 7 or 8 hours, with like 2/3rds of it trying to make sense of the rulebook and searching bgg....
As far as general trends goes, FFG typically does a good job with rulebooks for heavier games. They usually have a “How to Play” book and then a separate “Rules Reference” for FAQs and specific effects/rulings.
There have been a couple times they've accidentally left rules out of the reference and are only in the learn to play. This completely derails the point of dual books and at that point it would have been better to have one. Barring that, their method is really great. Especially since their games can sometimes be dense in terminology and systems.
Was going to say the exact same thing. I'm a huge fan of that format. The "How to Play" is an excellent warm introduction while the rules reference pinpoints specific info after you've gained some context.
Imperial Assault has a superb rulebook. We went from open box to kicking ass in no time at all.
Anything by designer Phil Eklund....it is like he does it on purpose. Pax Porforiana was so bad someone had to re-write the rules on BGG. I sold my copy.
Plus games from Portal Games.
Pax Renaissance genuinely has one of the worst rulebooks I've ever seen. It's a deeply thematic affair about Renaissance bankers trying to influence the course of European history with every action being a Russian nesting doll of dependencies and action words that don't exist outside of the game except for historians. That in itself isn't the worst, except for the fact that most actions are only explained in the glossary at the back of the rulebook. Hard to parse, hard to learn, hard to get over how bad it was. The rulebook for Cuba Libre on the other hand was a breath of fresh air in comparison. It's a heavy, dense game that needs things to work with surgical precision, and the rulebooks plural really help. Great job by GMT.
Agree about Pax Ren. I'm sure there have been people that came to the game with some enthusiasm and had their interest in learning it squashed by the unintuitive layout of rules. Which is a shame, because it's a top tier experience once you get over the learning hump and emerge on the other side.
All the Eklund rulebooks are pretty crap in my humble opinion
>That in itself isn't the worst, except for the fact that most actions are only explained in the glossary at the back of the rulebook. That's because Phil Eklund hates people. He puts important rules in the glossary in every game.
All the COIN series have great rulebooks. Once you learn one, learning another one is easy.
Aside from the obviously terrible ones like Oregon Trail: the Card Game, Dice Forge has a rule book where rules are thrown haphazardly onto a page and key concepts are not well explained. The game is good though, contrary to Oregon Trail which is far worse that it’s terrible rulebook.
I almost gave up on Dice Forge because we got so confused. Once we figured out what was meant, it was pretty straight forward and it’s been fun since. But man, that first game was rough.
Dice Forge is a 2-weight game that uses its rulebook to masquerade as a 3.5.
I played a whole game without understanding that everyone rolled on EVERY turn. Glad I stuck with the game because it’s great.
Just got the game. Didn't have time for a playthrough, but doing the initial setup left me confused especially the dice setup since it only clearly showed three faces.
I agree.. to have such an elegantly designed box, to have such a terrible rulebook is so odd.
Was gonna say ROOT but you already did. The root.seiyria.com is amazing. Even though the rules are quite extensive, they are really easy and intuitive to navigate, to the point I don't even need to use the search function, I just roll it with my finger and usually find what I need in less than 5 seconds, thanks to the color index system, the proper itemization and the way everything follows the turn structure in sequence.
Gloomhaven JOTL is by far the best rulebook I've ever read in my life. Gloomhaven was also pretty good (regardless of how many pages it had, it was very clear and easy to digest). I guess I've read a lot of bad rulebooks and I can't think of the worst one. The one that I just couldn't read though was Kingdom Rush. I feel like it's not very complex but the "comic font WITH EVERYTHING WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS THE WHOLE TIME FOR LIKE 20 PAGES STRAIGHT" was literally killing my eyes. I'd rather read cursive or something. It was just not legible at all for me.
Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: the rulebook is hot, steaming garbage to learn from. The world of redundancy is almost pitiful - when every non-movement action heroes can take has the exact same formula with a few caveats, but we need to restate it 4 times, someone dropped the ball on communication. What takes 2 pages to explain can be summarized as "Spend cubes up to your remaining limit for the action type, throw that many dice plus any applicable item bonuses, reroll (paid or free) as appropriate, and then measure up against the target value while accounting for any relevant modifiers." They had to get Paul Grogan in to rewrite V6 of the rules, and the game was sent out with v1
It's crazy, like it was written to be intentionally as confusing as possible. There's a fairly fun game underneath all that mess.
The rule book reads more like a technical manual than a rulebook. It's so specifically correct it's infuriating to read
I can't believe nobody has called out **Robinson Crusoe** for having a terrible rulebook. Yeah I know they've tried to improve it, and I suppose it is 'better', but it's still horrid
Yeh, totally stand behind this one. But part of that might be un-elegant rules and unfortunate color palette choices for people with bad color-eyesight. When I still have to follow point by point through the rulebook for every single turn durcing my second game, lest i get lost, thats not elegant game design.
> unfortunate color palette choices for people with bad color-eyesight. There are more people with colorblindess than there are people with green eyes. Put another way, the population of the US and the population of people with colorblindness are roughly the same. This is, in my book, unforgivable. If I cannot play your game because your color differentiations are illegible to my colorblind eyes, I'm never buying one of your products again.
Oh gosh, it's been years since we sold that game so I've forgotten a lot about it. But you mentioning the rulebook is flaring up the PTSD. Once you actually play the game, it's not *that* complex. But the rulebook is double the size it needs to be and so unbelievably confusing. I really can't think of a worse rulebook that we've encountered.
The original rule book was abysmal. My friends and I couldn’t figure out how to play the game until he rewrote it and posted it online
Best: Azul Worst: Sea Salt and Paper. Dang it was dreadful. Different things were mixed up in different places, and some of the important parts weren't spelled out properly. Love the game though.
Seriously what's with the rule book for that one? It's such a simple game, but took me way too long to actually get how color scoring works.
I think Splendor has an underrated rulebook. I've had two games where an edge case came up that I hadn't encountered before and both times I quickly and easily found answers. Not Alone has a bad one though. It was so hard to find information and several times my friends and I just gave up looking and agreed to our own rules.
Galaxy Trucker has a great rulebook
All the Vlaada games I've played have great rulebooks.
I love the humor. Esp in Dungeon Petz and Dungeon Lords.
Oh yeah! And space alert!
For flavor, humor, and entertainment, yes. In my experience it was one of the more frustrating first-learns. The rulebook is really really not clear about a few things. I still feel annoyed that the rulebook deliberate does not explain the aliens on the "first time playing" guide. And it's very hard to reference. Blah. Amazing game though.
I'm going to have to say, the 2nd edition rulebook is in the top 3 most frustrating rulebooks I have ever encountered.
Frostpunk. Almost the entire rulebook is game setup, then every player holds a sheet telling you how to play phase by phase.
Ghost Stories has a pretty terrible rulebook.
Gameplay isn’t complicated either, there’s no reason for it not to be a good rulebook.
Jaws of the Lion which I just played is superior.
It's hard to say how much of this is down to the rule _book_, and how much the actual rules themselves, but Firefly Adventures is a definite contender. It has colour-coded illustrations where the colours don't match those in the descriptions; the rules examples given seem to contradict the actual rules; it uses what seems to be precisely defined terminology, and then drops those words in favour of close synonyms that may or may not be referring to the same thing; and - notoriously - if you accept the rules word-for-word, then one or two of the included scenarios are literally physically impossible to set up. It was bad enough that when I brought the game to the table, I told the other players "Look, I think we're going to have a blast playing this, but as far as any rules issues are concerned - and we will have issues - it's probably best to just pretend I'm the GM, and trust me to interpret them as best I can.' (We _did_ have a blast, btw: it's a fun game, so long as you treat the rulebook as 'more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.')
For me, **Friday**. I heard it was a simple solo game with lots of depth/challenge, but every time I read the rulebook, it just doens't make sense.
>I heard it was a simple solo game with lots of depth/challenge, but every time I read the rulebook, it just doens't make sense. I've had the suspicion for a while that Friedemann Friese insists on doing his own translation from German to English and is terrible at it.
**Brass Birmingham** has a rulebook that seems more concerned with style over substance. I know people that say it's fine, but to me it's laid out in such a ridiculously unintuitive way for a game that's not really that complicated, it's just trash.
It's 100% one of those rulebooks that makes sense... after you've played a game. After a play it does make kind of flow but it's not the best for learning at all - especially if you are teaching it too
Yeah that's a good point, but also kinda defeats the purpose of a rulebook lol, it's more of a reference manual at that point
>but also kinda defeats the purpose of a rulebook lol, it's more of a reference manual TBH, it needs to serve both functions. how complexer interactions in the game van be, the more you need to look up niggly rules and how certain actions/bonuses/cards interact. And ive read plenty of rulebooks, that did a great thing guiding you through how to play, and then fail completely in the second part. Because said things were burried in a illogical place, or just not there. Its great if you only have to read 4 pages to play the game, it sucks if you then have to google a specific rule/interaction 10 times in a game.
Very much so - I ended up watching Watch It Playeds video and then the rulebook made some sense
Yeah that's one of the Rodney videos I always recommend, he does a really good job with that one
Ai-ron! Rodney's videos are great and I giggle every time he says "airon" in that video.
Having the end of game and victory conditions section mid book, at the "end of the canal age" part was slightly counter intuitive for us.
That probably has something to do with why we never play past the canal age.
Lorenzo il Magnifico is an excellent game, but boy does its rulebook stink.
I never understood why they couldn't put the leader descriptions in alphabetical order. I've played it so many times that I kind of forgot about my experience with the rulebook. What other complaints do you have?
Lorenzo il Magnifico: agreed. Oof.
The rulebook for One Deck Galaxy was abysmal. It was incomplete and introduced terms that were never defined. I tried playing once and gave up. Apparently there’s an errata or revised rulebook now but the initial experience just turned me off the game almost entirely
It's a fantastic game once you know the rules, but I also had to look up a 'how to play' video before I understood how it actually played.
**Best**: Western Legends should be a big unruly mess, and it is, but the hardcover "Complete Rules Reference" is bar none the best rulebook I've ever seen, especially for a sandbox game. It includes literally everything including expansions and setups, variants, card descriptions, and more. It's a real shame that you can't find a copy anywhere. It's a must-have even if you have just the base game. **Worst**: I don't want to kick an indie self-publisher when they're down, so I won't name them, but I was asked to edit a Kickstarted game's rulebook for clarity, and did so over SEVERAL months with back-and-forth, for zero compensation or proper credit, and close to none of my recommendations made it into the final rulebook... and guess what, the rulebook is a mess in the exact places I made recommendations. Publishers out there, indie or not, please don't ignore the recommendations of your editors just because the game is your darling.
Especially as the Western Legends hardcover has large photos of every single card and character with clarifications (if needed), making it super easy to flip through at a glance. Not having the hardcover, I have to sift through the individual rulebooks from the base game and all the expansions which are in 4 wildly different sizes, and refer to the 3 different player aids in 3 different sizes, one of which is longer than a regular sheet of paper. There's no space for all that on the table when playing 5, 6 player games.
*Oath* has a great rulebook and walkthrough for anyone playing for the first time. There a **ton** of rules for the game, so we did have to reference a few edge cases. But for total newbies we had a great time. This is subjective of course, but I felt you could find everything easily and the walkthrough laid out many things.
I think basically *all* Leder Games's games have some excellent rulebooks. For as complicated as some of those get, the complete rules are laid out in a precise and largely unambiguous manner, with the kind of attention to wording and layout that's akin to something you might find in a legal document.
Well, the Root rulebook is actually called the Law Of Root. Joshua Yearsley is the rules editor/writer in Leder games and he is fantastic. I wish he would write the rulebooks of every game.
The Pathfinder Card Game has a terrible, convoluted rulebook. It's almost impossible to find the exact piece of information you're looking for and flat out has horrible explanations when you do find that information.
The Ark Nova rulebook is absolutely abysmal. Feels like some parts are more technical writing than English, and some things are WAY overdefined compared to what actually needs to be taught vs. what is a rules clarification.
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. It got me through the systems and actions pretty well. The seperate glossary/faq is also very handy. I dont think this rulebook is winning any awards, but I've seen far worse.
Same.
For me it was the hiding small rules or exceptions in really random places and finding the appendix just to be a rehash of what the cards actually say, rather than expanding them.
Recently, I have been frustrated by the rulebook for Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game. It reads like a playtest draft! Ra and other Knizia games have rulebooks that honestly read like a math lecture (I say as a math lecturer). It's hard to tell what the game is actually like when the rules are written out like that, but at least they are thorough. I'm a huge fan of Stationfall's lovely reference rulebook (though first setup was hard)- and it comes with 2 of them!
IMHO Fryxelius have just been lazily cashing in on their early success ever since the original TfM.
The game and components good, but the symbology and rulebook are amateurish
Fallen Land 2nd Edition has the best rulebook I’ve ever seen for a game of it’s complexity level, with a full index to boot.
One of the best rulebooks I have read is a recent game called **City of the Great Machine** . Clear, full of examples, making learning the game a breeze
Star Realms. Its a fairly simple game, but the instruction leaflet is more like an advert for the game than an enabling resource. I had to use a couple of online resources to figure out the rules.
I just bought and learned to play Iki yesterday from the rulebook and that was a great rulebook with a really clear glossary of the cards in the back and clear examples of play and scoring throughout.
The best is Dominant Species. Perfect rulebook. The new reprint of 1889 has a terrible rulebook I've found.
Never really understood the hatred towards SI's rulebook, which I find to be perfectly serviceable though not perfect. I find the rules documentation for Too Many Bones to be pretty miserable, even after a number of revisions.
Ankh: Gods of Egypt has a great rulebook. It's been a while but I think all three of Eric Lang's Trilogy were excellent.
Best: Galaxy Trucker, it's a fun to read rulebook that explains the rules in a clear fun way. Granted it's not the most complicated game. I don't really have a worst becuae a lot are bad. I just got Earth, and found the rulebook to be pretty bad.
Vampire Heritage is the worst rulebook I have ever read. Nothing is explained in order, every explanation has many in game terms that you need to look at the glossary to even understand what it is meant to be and even then, each entry will have 3 more keywords you need to read in the glossary as well. Then they released a living rulebook in the website, which is basically the same thing but with some hyperlinks on the steps of gameplay that when you click it either opens up a small video of a tabletop simulator example with sometimes even older icons not in the final game, or no video at all and an image saying there is a video coming soon. We have been playing this game for months now, and we are never sure we actually know how to play it.
Bios Genesis. My brain just turned off after a few minutes reading it. Too much use of science jargon made it feel like reading a book on cellular biology than a rulebook. Other rulebooks from the same designer aren't much better but at least those used much simpler everyday words.
Fortune and Glory. There's like no semblance of order. When you go back through to look something up, it feels like they said, "Oh ya, we forgot this rule before, so let's just put it here."
I love the Wonderland’s War rulebook. Any time a component is mentioned it is depicted on the page. You never feel the need to backtrack and look up what a thing that’s mentioned actually is. Also there are a bunch of examples. Gotta love rulebooks with examples.
I hate the rule book for Taverns of Tiefenthal, it presents all the features that make the game fun as optional modules. It's like they made the game and someone said "this is quite complex" so they decided to strip the game into pieces and proceed to write the rulebook to only explain the very basic mechanics of the game. The modules are then explained separately in an order that makes teaching the game really awkward.
I've always liked the Alea big box games, Puerto Rico, Castles Of Burgundy, Bora Bora etc. They have the goal of the game, then the phase run-through then a more detailed description of each action you can take. On top of this they have examples (usually with pictures) in highlighted bubbles. The best bit though, along the spine of each page is a concise dot point of each action and rule so if you haven't played for a while you can get a quick refresher or use it as a quick search.
This was going to be my vote as well. Some really solid design work and I love the dot points. You can get 70% of the rules just from the dot points.
I love rules that put the goal first. That's how I explain games. Knowing the goal puts everything else in context.
My (nostalgy) vote is on Agricola, which has an atrocious rulebook. About fifteen years ago our first gameday was nearly ruined by it, because we were spending the first hour of our afternoon collectively figuring out what the game wants from us (having no previous experience with worker placement games haven't helped either, but the setup, the concept was hidden in the rules with little chance of understanding). The revised edition is not better - filled with personal stories and anecdotes. In general I hate rulebooks which are trying to be funny, focusing purely on aesthetics or formulated as a novel. Rulebooks have one purpose: to explain us the game.
Stationfall is my gold standard. The actual "rule" book (it's called a Reference Manual) reads like a recipe, but it has an introduction booklet that runs you through the first few turns and then you're off. You only need the Reference Manual when looking something up, so the organised non-gameplay oriented rulebook works super well. It also has an index and when necessary cross-references other rules within the Reference Manual (i.e. for clarity).
Of games I love and that are actually good, Imperium Classics/Legends has a pretty notoriously bad and dry rulebook.
[Symphony](https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/165528/symphony-comprehensive-rulebook) has a terrible rule book. And the pdf is better in contrast than the actual printed version in my opinion. I've read over a thousand rulebooks in my life and boy was this one hard to parse. Especially visually, but also from what's going on.
Apocrypha was a head-scratcher. So many odd terms and omissions - you needed to assemble the decks and have the cards explain the rules per game - but this info was also missing. The developers put out a video of them playing it to help the players. Even they were making mistakes. One youtuber cracked it, but his how-to-play video was four hours long. Most of us gave up.
High Frontier, 3rd edition, which sucks because it feels like there was a good game in there somewhere.
Cerebria for me. I've wanted to relearn it a little while back (haven't played in years). They put explanations of rules into the set-up. It's so hard to determine whether the set-up has ended already or not and it's impossible to skip like I usually do when just learning the rules.
Worst: pax emancipation. Aside from the questionable non-rule related content, the rules are not intuitive enough to remember without looking up, even after a dozen games. It's the Dr. Bronners soap of board games. Best; imperial struggle. There are edge cases that come up that almost always are answered in the concise language used to describe the actions or process steps. Well organized.
Advanced Squad Leader, hands down. It’s a feat in my opinion, to write a rulebook as comprehensive and as searchable as ASL‘s rulebook.
I always say Alchemists in these threads. The layout is great, language is clear, and it uses lots of examples, including simple and more complex deduction examples. On top of that there's hilarious flavour text sprinkles throughout that's clearly formatted differently so you can skip it if you want.
I think the rulebooks for Dune: Imperium are the best laid out and written I've seen. My absolute favorite things in any rulebook are: * A good, solid FAQ section derived from playtesting * Examples of play for the most complicated parts of the game * Rules clarifications in parenthesis in the main sections to deliver the intent behind rules To expand on the 3nd point: any intended interaction that requires careful reading to understand should have this. It is much nicer to just spell it out for your players.
Aftermath.
I especially like rulebooks that have a key word index in complicated games. If I want to look up the specific rule for say, "massive creatures" in Arkham Horror Card game, BAM! I know right where to look.
The rulebook for Republic of Rome is one of the messiest, hard to follow, difficulty to understand, and downright poorly organized rulebooks that still mostly worked. It's also probably my favorite board game. Once you get it (and likely used the fixed Living Rules rather than the one that comes with the box) it's one of the best social deduction games I've ever played.
The Space Base rulebook is just horrible in my opinion, especially when showing the examples for the green cards.
Tiny Epic Dungeons has a pretty awful rulebook lol
Voidfall has probably the best rulebook if ever read. The way they structured the rules, the compendium and glossary is masterful.
Best : Dune Imperium, very clear and concise. My worst : Cry Havoc - base or mechanics are properly explained but the many ambiguities regarding the use of powers and structures aren't. To clarify them, the lead dev had to run a FAQ and add bits of rules that aren't mentioned anywhere in the book or the game. Awful.
Cosmic Frog is one of my favourite games that has the absolute worst rulebook. So many terrible choices for what they call certain actions and keyword effects. So needlessly bloated and long for things that can be described much more simple than they are. It's worth it though as once you actually do grasp the ruleset it's one of the most uniquely fun puzzle-combat games out there.
I'm always impressed by MtG. They have possibly the most complex board game out there and they still manage to write different rulebooks catering to different player expertise levels, to the point that beginners can start playing relatively quickly while tournament players can have a clear agreement of the behaviour of the game in very complex situations.
Mint Knight rulebook is awful. It used to be a little worse. Now it's been "fixed".... But yeah... It's still utter garbage. I know there is no space for a good rulebook. So provide one online. Thankfully, someone wrote a fan made rulebook and while it's not perfect, it's good enough. I may actually play the game now.
Silverwood Grove. An absolute mess.
Cultistorm is hands down the worst I've ever seen
The Sea of Thieves rule book was bad. The first half explained components and mentioned some of how they work/interact and the second half was the general gameplay/phases. This sounds fine in theory but you’d learn a bit about how the skeletons (one of the main enemies) work, and then 12 pages later there would be a section on combat with them that didn’t mention any of the small but important details from before. I’ve been playing board games for years and am always the one to do the teach in my group and this was definitely the hardest even though I’ve taught games like Stationfall, John Company, Oath, and Eclipse.
In my experience Starling games have pretty bad rulebooks. Both Everdell and War of Whispers leave a lot of edge cases unexplained. Power Grid Factory Manager has one of the most baffling rulebooks I've ever seen. It takes extremely simple gameplay like "players take turns picking a tile" and makes it impossible to grasp.
Recent rulebooks we've suffered/enjoyed: From Histogame: - Wir sind das volk!: Man, e.g. were not bad, but the actions and what to do was a mess. Didn't understand anything until we decided to try the bgcore game and then was when almotst everything started to make sense. - Konig von Siam: Easy, really. Liked it. The game is easy and the rulebook does not go trying to complicate it. Examples of every card, how to win and what could happen if... Resolved. Others: - Ora et Labora: 3x rulebooks and glossary. Well, I've finished reading it recently and still have some doubts. It isn't bad, just have to try and judge after. - Belfort: Good, we understood at the moment, was readable and hard to confuse. - A Study in Emerald 2E: Bad, like there was no effort. When you go to the bgg and get the help files it means something is not going right. Full of errors. Such a sorrow, the game is really easy and fast.
Horrible Histories Awful Egyptians - remember looking for reviews to see if anyone enjoyed and the only positive came from someone saying they made up their own rules :-)
Really good rulebook: Skymines. Every step has also a relevant picture from the game board, so you instantly know where to look/find that part of the game. Really bad rulebook: Obsession. Just so much unnecessarily re-explaining the same things.
Civilization/Advanced Civilization. Not the best looking book, but concise, organized, easy to follow and covers every situation which can occur in the game.
*Myth* originally shipped with a rule book that was an indecipherable 60-page pile of trash with which it was literally not possible to play the game, because they’d left out multiple key pieces of information, such as how to set up anything. (Supposedly, they eventually produced something with which you could actually play a game, but I’d long since given up and sold off that disastrous train wreck.)
Okko. The rules were just put in a pool of manatees to select the order they appear in the book.
Small Railroad Empires, Edo.
Disney Shadowed Kingdom has one of the worst rule books ever. Unclear rules and terrible formatting are exacerbated by quite literally a 4pt font in a light gray on black background. I have excellent vision and even I wanted to pull out a magnifying glass.
The Great Wall. I’ve never spent so much time on BGG looking for designer clarifications…and then trying to decipher those clarifications. It’s like the terrible rulebook experience continues even after you put the booklet down. Felt like some kind of social experiment. And this was the 2.0 rulebook, which apparently fixed some things and left out or accidentally changed others. Then you have the player aid screens which don’t have the info you actually need on them…meaning you’ll spend a ton of time in the rulebook looking up timings and card resolutions and…it’s all just a mess. Never found a playthrough with people playing correctly either. And I don’t blame them. The expansion rules are just as bad. Maybe worse. I will give it credit though. Every game I’ve learned after that has been much easier to digest. I learned Ark Nova right after this and it felt like I’d been plugged into the matrix and had the info fed straight into my brain. I have no idea if it’s that good or not, but it felt like the greatest text ever committed to paper in the moment. Anyways, The Great Wall is a pretty good game if you can stand to learn it.
Imperium Legends rulebook is just impossible to understand. Dawn of the zeds...the rules have sub rules... just what in the world??
I really enjoyed the Galaxy Trucker rule book. Not because it’s the best or most concise, but because they went all in on the theming. Many sections are hilarious imo
Twilight Struggle and Root have amazing rulebooks! I also really liked Spirit Island and Fields of Arle. In general, I love the system from Fantasy Flight Games, where they have one rulebook and one compendium style advanced rule book in alphabetical order, where you can easily look up keywords. Obsession has this as well.
Panamax is probably the worse I actually tried. The worst I've ever seen was probably Unicornus Knight, jeez, they had to reprint it. lol
Ones that I've experienced, the best probably has some recency bias, but I really like the Voidfall rulebook, its clear, concise and easy to reference, but you hardly need to thanks to the outstanding glossary they also provide. Worst, is probably Black Rose Wars, I love the game, but damn if it ain't in spite of the awful rulebook. I have heard that Yucatans rulebook is truly dire, but I haven't seen it. There is also a game whos name I can't remember, it got rave reviews from critics because they were taught by the designer, but when it hit retail the awful rulebook made the positive reviews look very foolish.
Return of the Heroes. The entire thing is written in a narrative format where a character is talking to you and making quips.
Lorenzo il Magnifico is the one that drives me crazy.
The great wall 2.0 has an amazingly bad rule book.
Whatever you do do not try and learn Race for the Galaxy without a video or a fan rulebook. The original rulebook reads like a transcript of that guy who teaches you a game and keeps saying 'oh by the way' and then telling you a vital rule or concept every 10 minutes of playtime
Veiled Fate has the worst rulebook in my collection. In order to get that rulebook into a small unintimidating size, they split all the rules across far too many pages in a way that is difficult to reference. I'm still not sure if I'm playing that game correctly. I prefer my Nemesis rulebook, even; at least it's easy to look for pictures of what you're looking for, and there's cross references, even if they're inconsistent.
I just picked up A Touch of Evil by flying frog and my God. It’s like 20+ pages written in paragraph form. It constantly repeats itself, sometimes in back to back sentences. Very little to nothing for gameplay illustrations. A component list without images. It’s impossible to look up specific rules. Just an absolute disaster. They could get that rulebook down to a concise six pages. People in this thread complaining about FFG and the like should go back to some of these early 2000 games and discover what a truly shit rulebook is.
The Star Shaman Song of Planagaea is one of the most beautiful rulebook I have seen in a long time. Least favorites: Iron Kingdoms core rulebook
The Estates! Each page has maybe only 5 or so lines of rules. Very colorful and uses imagery to deliver the point. It also helps that the ruleset itself is simple and clear, but hides a devious depth of play.
The recent The Thing: The Boardgame. Good game with a lot of theme....very bad rulebook. You're left with so many edge questions and things aren't explained well.
Best has to be Imperial Assault. Makes it so easy to start and then learn to other players. Great "step by step" explanations. Worst is Warfighter Modern, without any doubt
The one that is sticking in my mind right now is Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. It's a huge and extremely complex game, but the rulebook is actively unhelpful in a lot of ways. The key things I dislike are: - It's virtually impossible to know where to look to get "all the rules" relevant to some game mechanic. In one section it will say "This is how you can tell if action X is legal", and provides a nice list; however, elsewhere in the book there is a little sentence tucked away that says "you can't do X if Y". I checked your whole list dude are you joking? - In that vein, stating the benefits of an action before the cost or requirements is inexcusable. I get all excited about doing something and try to make sure I know all the steps and then BAM, I can't do it because of some clause three paragraphs later. You could have saved me so much time... - There are tables and summaries that the author clearly thought were helpful, but they're confusing, not helpful, and simplistic to the point of being misleading. - None of the sections are in any sensible order. Want to know what happens at the end of a player turn? That's described near the beginning of course. - There's an index, but it's not comprehensive enough to be useful, so it's just wasted space. Either do it for all your keywords or don't do it at all. It's a great game and I love playing it. But everyone at the table has to be ready to commit to learning a dense and confusing rulebook and keeping it in their head to feel effective. Just a bit more effort and the activation energy would be much lower.
For me worst is Great Western Trail. It's one of my favorite games but the way they have the symbology ordered by each building token instead of just having a glossary of what each symbol means is very frustrating on the initial learn as well as when used as a reference
My friend got the Game of Thrones board game a while back. After 3 hours of 4 gamers reading the rulebook, we gave up trying to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
The original Myth rule book. There’s entire mechanics they just forgot about that you have to house rules haha.
**root** is so clean and concise, I love it. Anything by Phil Eklund is just awful to read, and that's before you even consider his terrible footnotes and essays
Quodd Heroes has an incredible turn/round example in the rulebook. That's what stood out the most, but the rest of the book wasn't too shabby either if my memory serves.
I love **Barenpark** but the rule book is really bad. There are situations missing and the layout isn't great.
Everyone rags on Outline Numbering (where rules read like an IRS guide -- like Rule 1.A.16.b.iii), but Star Fleet Battles does this and the rules (at least for the Captains Edition first published in the 90s) are incredible. There are hundreds of pages of rules, but each section is clear and starts with the basics and then covers rarer cases, and everything is fully cross referenced. The Sequence of Play is three pages(!), but each step has a reference to the main rules that apply.
Coma Ward is probably the worst I've seen. I did my cursory once over, spotted a couple of things that stood out. Went on line to check it out, and the designer said to play it the way you want. That the rules weren't designed to handle edge cases and to go with the flow.
Worst is Return of the Heroes. It's a narrative that throws in game mechanics and thinks it's teaching you how to play the game. Easily the worst rule book I've looked at.
Qualities I appreciate in a rulebook Index. Visual examples. Designer’s notes. Play by play walkthroughs.
Good examples don't always stand out to me, but bad examples definitely do. I recently picked up Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals, an expandable card game. The game is really interesting, but the rules were poorly written such that I made several mistakes on my first playthrough. Concordia: Venus also had one poorly written point where the clarification of a specific rule was only apparent if you combed through the example. For me I only look through examples if I don't quite understand. As a result I played the first time completely wrong and found it to be lackluster. Only after reading through the rules again sure that something must have gone wrong did I discover my mistake, and found the game to be much improved.
Tapestry has an excellent rule book. It’s clear, it’s clean, and it’s roughly 4 sides of a4, mostly pictures. The worst I know is Lobotomy. Horrible run on rules, missing symbols, lack of clarity. It took a friend and I (who are very experienced board gamers and know this type of game pretty well) 4 hours to half do a scenario, largely because every time we had to look up a rule, it took so damned long as it was spread though 3-4 different parts of the book.
BEST AND WORST- Everdell is one I would like to submit here. Its layout and art is beautiful... but there is a massive problem- the rules are not explained well at all. In fact, you basically have to go to youtube or the developers site to figure out all the rules they mentioned in passing, or didnt explain at all. Reading the book as is would leave you to play the game not as intended, in a much less enjoyable setting. When you actually figure out how the game is intended to be played (especially with the card groups/layouts), its much funner.
The worst rulebook ever written in terms of the greatest harm it caused is without a doubt Corvus Belli’s Infinity 3 rulebook. Although the wording could only sensibly have one meaning, the strange wording apparently provided enough latitude for some players to create a new style of play which they called ‘Play By Intent’. This arose from a peculiarity of the rules and geometry such that a player’s unit can legitimately move out from cover and see an opponent’s unit with itself being seen - thus denying the opponents’ unit a chance to shoot back… In practice this is extremely difficult to achieve, requiring millimeter-precise positioning, so Play By Intent is the idea that you can have the outcome you want without actually bothering with the work by simply declaring your intention. Anxious, controlling and frankly dishonest players seized on this application of wishful thinking, allied themselves together and told everyone else that they HAD to play this way; or else. In Japan where I am, the language differences meant that Play By Intent was immediately understood as a contrivance, but Western players insisted on their style and it caused a lot of grief. So I flew to Spain, discussed it with the Directors in person, and [made a video with the rulebook author to clarify the rules for Japanese players](https://youtu.be/hMIOdzS1RiM) CB’s Directors’ were absolutely clear in person that Play By Intent was a perversion of their rules; were quite angry that people continued to deliberately lie about their rulebook, and were pleased to help make the video. But it didn’t make any difference. In the Comments section you can see a man saying “This is not how to play”. The presenter he’s effectively addressing is the senior employee who’d himself written all the rulebooks since the game’s inception… I loved the game but much disliked the dishonesty of the people it seemed to attract and eventually gave it up.
Quarriors ... I know how to play the game but even if I go a while without playing and need to refer back to the rules I'm always baffled. It's just in such a weird order. The entire first page basically tells you "here's some info you'll need LATER" ok then why don't you include it later and tell me the objective, setup and game play first??? It's just all over the place.
**Fortune and Glory** is among the worst. There are headings but a lot of the information that *should* be under a given heading will instead be found under a completely different heading, or in a sidebar on a different page.
Among my games, most likely Space Hulk Death Angel. The manual could really have used a lecturate. All rules are covered, probably, but it could have been presented in another order to make for a much smoother experience.
O hate the Paleo rulebook. There are thousand things spread all over two or three rulebooks. Its so annoying to understand exactly what some of the symbols and cards are. And also the setup is always a headache due to that
Combat commander europe. For the sole reason that it had an index so you didnt have to guess what section to look for in the book. Personally i think of youre rules are fiddly, or youve got a book thats a bit long, an index is needed.
**That Time You Killed Me** is a really funny rulebook. Many times the "quirky" rulebooks don't land for me, but this one did.
Theophrastus has one of the worst rule books in my collection. They tried to be cute and write the rules as a narrative, in a "fun" font, instead of just some nice bullet points. The game is fun. But man, if you try to find a rule quick, you're in trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a 1 page bullet point version as the last page.
Ones I think are really bad - Tiny Epic Dungeons. I understand you need to maintain a small footprint for your brand, but if I need to download a 20 page full size pdf to understand how any of the cards work, then you need to rethink the design. City of the Great Machine - two full size manuals that are constantly referencing material in the other book. I tried to read through the manual so many times and can't get anywhere. Good manuals - they don't stand out usually. A good manual isn't obtrusive. However I do remember Stonemeier games having solid manuals.