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 warboss wrote:
It's like someone looked at the old SFB rules and said to themselves "How can I turn half of these words into symbols and tokens?".

To find out you need to go to binder 2 and read 10.4.16b.

It does kinda give off "what if I made SFB following modern game design principles" type vibes.

With all the things going on and being tracked on a single ship, I imagine it's a nightmare to run TWO ships at a time and the thought of running even more than that makes my brain melt.

 warboss wrote:
It's like someone looked at the old SFB rules and said to themselves "How can I turn half of these words into symbols and tokens?".

I didn't know I could be this horrified. Thanks.

Ahtman wrote:To find out you need to go to binder 2 and read 10.4.16b.

chaos0xomega wrote:It does kinda give off "what if I made SFB following modern game design principles" type vibes.

Voss wrote:I didn't know I could be this horrified. Thanks.

Lol, I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way. It's not that I'm opposed to either complicated rules or tokenapalooza (I played both FASA trek and Xwing) but this is the exact point in the PDF where they lost me. Eight different symbols/tokens (technically nine but I'm counting the mirror image of one as the same) in one small section of the small Federation ship's control panel (Defiant) governing only one part (admittedly important) of the ship's activation... and that's not including the actual English words that are also obviously rules.

and I'm sure that once you're familiar with how the game plays that symbol salad has meaning, but for a new player thats super intimidating and a bit of a learning curve. When you're asking a player to use symbols instead of natural language, well... you're asking them to learn a new language, and that has mental overhead and can be difficult. This is one thing that GW generally does well in terms of using simple terminology and numbers to communicate rules and stats. Symbols have their place and can be a powerful tool when used correctly, but I think this is a bit too much.

chaos0xomega wrote:
This is one thing that GW generally does well in terms of using simple terminology and numbers to communicate rules and stats. Symbols have their place and can be a powerful tool when used correctly, but I think this is a bit too much.

Other than Kill Team, which has much the same problem IMO.

And yeah, I was really interested in this game until I read the rulebook, but I can't fathom I'd ever be able to bring a casual new person in.

I dont think Kill Team is that bad, honestly the biggest problem is that the symbols are unintuitive (they should have matched the # in inches to the number of sides on the polygons they used, though apparenlty the symbols were an afterthought intended for color blindness and the color is the primary factor that they used during playtesting, but whatever), but otherwise the game flows smoothly and doesn't require a semester of foreign language studies to wrap ones head around.

But yeah, I dont know that theres a way to fix the rulebook to make it more approachable. As you said I doubt I'd be able to get a casual to play this, I don't even think I'd be able to get myself to play this. The rulebook gives me anxiety, I get lost trying to read it, after a couple pages at a time I'm overwhelmed and just have to close it. I understand top level what the game wants you to do, I just don't know that I could ever actually navigate playing it, just seems like too many moving (in some cases literally) parts for me to hold together.

The symbols make it look like an awful awful awful system at first glance, but even knowing nothing about this ruleset the weapons chart almost makes complete sense after looking at it for a minute.

It's a crappy resolution image, but those black symbols after the weapons are obviously firing arcs, anybody used to space combat games should recognize those at a glance.

Skimming the rulebook, it does look dense, but not much moreso than a lot of the euro games my group is into. This feels like an Ark Nova take on Federation Commander. Has a nice glossary of icons at the back of the book, I can see my group likeing this game.

You're right, I think. It does become intuitive once you take some time to parse it. I think theres probably a better way to present the info though, that presentation of the weapon block is kind of dense, some formatting into a proper "weapon profile" in place of just presenting a mashup of symbols, numbers, and words in basically a list format is not helping.

 The Phazer wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
This is one thing that GW generally does well in terms of using simple terminology and numbers to communicate rules and stats. Symbols have their place and can be a powerful tool when used correctly, but I think this is a bit too much.

Other than Kill Team, which has much the same problem IMO.

And yeah, I was really interested in this game until I read the rulebook, but I can't fathom I'd ever be able to bring a casual new person in.

And Warcry and to a lesser extent Underworlds - the symbols thing puts me off - not how my brain works.

Nice theme song though.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Nice theme song though.

I had to turn off the subtitles to enjoy it as the stream of symbols, numbers, and icons was a bit distracting.

While the Defiant control panel is certainly cluttered with symbols and could have been presented better, it's not indecipherable...

I've got the feeling it would play fine with a little familiarity.