When I say "game" here, I mean an abstract strategy game, or a Eurogame, or anything else that's made out of math. Games where actions like "map the state space" or "run tree search from this position" make sense. If you're playing Werewolf or Apples to Apples, this way of thinking will be completely useless.
When I'm learning a new game, I frequently find myself mentally tracking a distinction between "the contents of the rulebook" and another concept that I don't have a good name for. In this essay I'll be referring to that second thing as the "rules".
Imagine that you've received the rulebook for a game but none of the other components. You still have all the information you need. Given enough paper, pencils, and 3D printer filament, you could recreate all the components you're missing and start playing. Equivalently, you could build a copy in Tabletop Simulator using your 1337 haxor skillz.
In fact, you could still play the game even if the rulebook's tutorial section, and the examples, and the strategy notes were all removed. Those aren't part of the "rules", strictly construed. The tutorial is a teaching aid designed to make the process of getting the "rules" into someone's brain faster and less painful. You don't need to read the examples if you read the rest of the text carefully enough. Some games are tricky enough to figure out that it's better to give a few strategy pointers up front, but the humans around the table would've figured them out for themselves eventually. (If your table has any Vulkans, they already figured out the strategy before you even got to that section of the rulebook.)
But there are some games that you couldn't play if you only had the rulebook, because there's information embedded in the components that doesn't appear in the rulebook. Think card text in deckbuilders, or in anything that has an event deck. You need that information to be able to play the game, so it should be considered part of the "rules". (I want to use the development cards in Catan as an example here, but Catan's unusually comprehensive rulebook prints the text of the cards and the number of copies of each that exist!)
The "rules" to games with decks of cards with text on them tend to divide naturally into two parts: a general framework of sorts, which gets printed in the rulebook and which you should learn before you start playing, and then a bunch of extra one-offs to add variety, which are printed on the cards and which you can learn on the fly. Discovering the chaos lurking in the deck is a major source of fun for the first few plays, but if you feel like you have a reduced ability to make strategic decisions while you're still discovering the deck, you're right, because if you do not know the deck you do not know the full "rules" to the game.
There can be information hidden in components even if they don't have text. If the bank can run out of resources, you need to know how many of each resource exist. Rulebooks are pretty good at printing component counts, but they're not perfect. I don't think that the rulebook for Brass: Birmingham breaks down the number of industry tiles you have per level.
The corner cases are fun to probe.
Jenga is either really simple, if you can take the physical world for granted, or really complicated, if you're explaining it to a computer and have to include a physics engine.
I think the "rules" to Kabuto Sumo would include something like CAD drawings for the little wooden pieces.
What about Scrabble? The full "rules" to Scrabble would have to incorporate a copy of the official Scrabble™ Dictionary®.
All else equal, I usually prefer games with shorter rulebooks, with a smaller framework-part-of-the-"rules" to learn ahead of time and keep in your head.
But I also, separately, admire games with simple "rules", and that's a different thing. If you have a simple rulebook and an extremely load-bearing event deck, you have a game that feels simple to play, but that's only because most of the information that makes up the game doesn't have to live in a player's head at any one time. It's not simple in absolute terms. It has high Kolmogorov complexity. It's not elegant.
2025-09-22
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