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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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A friend of mine likes to say “Jargon is an impediment to communication.” He works in middle management so I figure he knows what he’s talking about when he says that specialized terms can sometimes cause other people to have no idea what you’re talking about.
Games tend to have a lot of specialized terms, sometimes using regular old words in different ways. Some role playing games, with their love of acronyms, practically sound like you’re talking to each other in computer language. And when you see a commonly used term being used in a different way or a different term used in place of a common term, it can at least make you question what the designers were thinking, possibly even really confusing the heck out of you.
That same friend, while he likes Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, hates the fact that the draw pile is called the case file and the discard pile is called London, something you can’t escape from since those terms on the playing cards. Yes, it is atmospheric but it makes it just that much more difficult to teach the game and to remember what the game’s jargon is.
When I was reading the rules to Master of Rules (thanks Tanga) recently, I found myself wondering what they were thinking when it came to using the word trick.
For those of you haven’t played Master of Rules (and, to be honest, I’m one of those people. I’ve just read the rules. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet), it’s a game where players take turns playing two cards per turn. One of those cards is a number card and the other is a Rule Card, which states the condition in which the player can earn the Rule Card they played as a point, a condition that involves all the number cards that have been played that turn.
The game itself actually looks pretty simple with some nice bluffing elements, as well as some nice game theory elements since you need to predict what the other players are going to do. However, as ironic as it is for a game called Master of Rules to do this, I think the rules kind of fell down on the job.
Honestly, I think that the rules were a little confusing about order of play (you always redraw after you play a card but those actions were listed in different sections of the order of play) and I think calling the Rule Cards Goal Cards would explain what they do much better, although Master of Goals isn’t as cool a name.
However, when the rules called each player playing a card a trick, my brain went “Wha?”
Maybe that is technically true but each player has to play two cards (two tricks per turn according to the rules) before anything is resolved and the turn could be resolved with no players getting a point or multiple players getting a point.
The word trick automatically brings to mind trick-taking games like Euchre or Bridge or Wizard or, well a whole lot of other games, old and new. And I don’t think there is anyone who could argue that Master of Rules is a trick-taking game with a straight face. The use of that one word made me reread the rules twice to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
Now, you can point out that the game has been translated from another language (and I think most of the people reading this blog has seen some translating doozies) and that I am being pretty darn nit-picky here. And, those are both good points.
However, let’s be honest here. The rule book is an integral part of a game. And when you are learning a game through the rule book or you have to teach a game using the rule book, you want that rule book to be as clear as possible. If a rule book makes learning a game more difficult or more frustrating for the people who I am teaching, that make the rule book an obstacle in ever playing the game at all.
Now, there are extenuating circumstances. If I am reading the rules to a longer and more complicated game like, say, Advanced Squad Leader or Star Fleet Battles or even Dominant Species, I expect to make mistakes learning the game and for the rule book to be complicated. But when a one-sheet instruction manual for what looks to be a fairly simple game that should take a half hour or less to play is confusing, that’s an issue.
I have seen far, far worse rule sets but its been a while since I read a rule set that made me go "Wha?"
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