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Hold onto your hats folks, we are about to get into a riveting topic! You can thank your buddy Evil Monkeigh over at the Delta Vector blog for this one! I was sharing with him my Work-in-Progress design from Homer's Heroes. As always, he and the Google Group gave me some good feedback. However, in the process he also recommended that I share some thoughts on rule book lay-out and design on my blog! That was the spark for this post.

You may notice that in my reviews, I rarely talk about how a book is laid-out or how the ideas are organized. For the most part, I gloss over that. I find reviews that tell me things about font size, white space, lay-out, page count, etc. to be adding words but not a lot of value there. Yet, here I am about to talk about it.

At first glance, how you lay-out your rules seems like an after thought for post-production. After all, the key ideas are your cool new activation system, fluffing out your concept, or how to resolve an action. Those are all very important, but are completely useless if no one can understand what you are trying to tell them.

Remember, to be a game designer you need games for people to play. In order for people to play your games, they have to be able to interpret your rules in a meaningful way.

You can read the full story here:http://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2022/01/wargame-design-rules-lay-outs.html

So, how do you prefer to organize your thoughts into words?

My approach has been from walkthrough/tutorial setup as a player plays through the game. So as a player starts a game for the first time, the rules would flow with the gameplay. An vague example would be "step 1: set up, step 2: activate units, etc.". My thoughts were that if two new players wanted to sit down for the first time without reading the rules beforehand, they could have a "follow along" style guide to get them through their first game. Ideally players should familiarize themselves with the system before playing, but this isn't always the case.

By setting up this way it also creates an easier system of looking up the rules for players that are familiar with the system. A player that is looking up combat could be flipping through and think "that comes after setup" so they could use that to try and locate the rules they're looking for without using an index.

I *try* to write rules in a way that builds on itself, like stacking building blocks, where each new rule you encounter references back to a previous rule so theres never any confusion or uncertainty as to how something works and you never say to yourself "well, I guess I'll understand how this rule really works once I get to the section about melee combat", etc. Unfortunately, wargames rules are often more complex than that and you will have rules that mean different things in different phases of the game or interact differently based on more advanced rules that it might not make sense to explain before a certain point, etc.

Personally, I think FFG roughly had it right with their approach of providing two rulebooks for each game - a quick start guide containing rules laid out in a step by step process to get newcomers playing as fast as possible and a rules reference which contains all of the rules in detail, but their implementation/execution was often poor IMO as you needed to use the rules reference in conjunction with the quick start guide to fully play the game as neither book was a full rulebook and each had rules and concepts that were omitted from the other. In my view, the rules reference should be a "complete" rulebook which is organized roughly along the lines of modern 40k rulebooks - typically starts with an explanation of a unit/weapon profile, then the basic conventions of gameplay (things like dice rolling, skill testing, core resolution mechanics, explanation of certain terms and top-level overview of gameplay concepts like line of sight, etc.), then the turn structure/core gameplay loop (phases of gameplay and the pertinent rules and mechanical interactions players will encounter), then more detailed/advanced rules (USRs, terrain, strategems, keywords, army building, deployment, etc.), and finally mission/scenario stuff and special rules, etc. BUT, the quick start guide should be small and pamphlet sized, and basically organized in reverse and follow the apporach kain20k laid out where it should be a step by step tutorial and walkthrough of the game through basically a "fixed encounter" type scenario where players are instructed on what to do and when, starting with determining mission/setup, deployment, and then running through each step of each turn and explaining stats and rules only as they become relevant in the players experience of gameplay, and then end with a more detailed explanation of the various core rules and interactions, etc. that don't fit neatly into the guided walkthrough.

My rationale is that the 40k style rulebook is great once you already know how to play the game, but as a beginner or newcomer it is dense and requires a player to essentially read through it in full (potentially several times depending on how quickly they pick up on things) before they can really play the game with a sound understanding of all the rules interactions and what it is they are doing and expected to do, etc. OTOH the quick start guide gets players going immediately through the core gameplay loop without the need to pre-read anything really, and familiarizes them with basic game concepts and turn structure, etc. from a practical standpoint before attempting to burden them with the knowledge of how all the components and mechanics interact and function. This approach might work better with a "boxed" game, i.e. something that comes with a starter set where the designer knows what models/units/rules, etc. the players will have access to and can control the beginners gameplay experience, thus making the "starter set" a true introduction to the game for starters, as opposed to whats become typical for many games where its simply a bundle deal that gets players a big collection of models + a rulebook at a lower price. Even without that though, a game without such a set could still theoretically provide such a quick-start guide to players by providing some sample data sheets that can be used with generic miniatures and saying "pretend your miniatures are orcs and your opponents miniatures are knights, here are there stats, now do as instructed as you work through the example of play provided over the next five pages." kind of thing. IIRC I believe that Mike Hutchinsons A Billion Suns does something like this within the rulebook, providing a few page long "example of play" that walks players (roughly) through a small encounter between two pre-built opposing forces.

I like explaining what's going in in broad terms first, then detail things one by one. Hate it when rules just dive deep right off the bat without any context of what's coming at the next step and you have to read the whole thing before anything clicks together.

Yeah, thats basically what I said. I prefer them written in a way that reading the book front-to-back I can fully understand what it is I am doing without ever questioning what I am being told.

IMO, the worst sin a rulebook can commit is to not tell me what the goal of the game (or the specific phase of the game) is before explaining to me the mechanics of what I am doing. It seems obvious, but so many rulebooks are written in the sense of "Now you will do this, followed by this, and if this happens then you cant do this and must instead do this other thing, and at the end you can do this or that. The goal is to have the most widgets at the end, good luck!" - this doesn't look like a problem when its written in a single sentence/paragraph, but when the rulebook is 20+ pages long and the piece that says "the goal is to have the most widgets at the end" is towards the end of the book, it creates a lot of problems in terms of trying to understand the whens and whys, etc of when to take certain actions or do certain things instead of letting the player read the rules with an understanding of how it helps them drive their goal.

This is especially true in the sense of certain more complex games that may have multiple paths to win and elements of resource conversion, etc. that offer complex "paths to victory". Often, even if the rules state the goal of the game up-front, these paths to victory aren't always clearly explained up-front, and instead the game simply explains to you how to resolve certain mechanics and interactions up front without first giving you a clear understanding of why you would want to.

I like the first page or so to be a really top level skim of what the game is.

"There is a movement phase, then a shooting phase, then a combat phase. You fight to score objectives" or whatever.

That way I have the framework of the game in my mind. I don't particularly mind reading a rule and thinking "I'm sure that'll make sense later", I get that wargames are complex and just can't be expressed linearly.
*Although it is important to try and get a logical order

I played a fan made supplement and the rules were just in such a difficult order.

Stuff like you'd have a block of weapon stats, then a block of army building and a few notes on scenarios, then another block of weapon stats, another block of army building, and the a full block on scenarios (but not including the prior note - that's still important).

I can see the logic, they separated two types of teams out but holy hell was it annoying.
I have no idea what possessed them to put the first scenario note in there though, only possible reason was they had space spare at the bottom of the page.

I also experience this a lot in my 40k codex. The army rules are listed in two different places, separated by the crusade rules. Grr!

So a logical layout really does help to make flowing through the rulebook a lot easier.
Not just on first read but referencing back to find something.