Games aren’t much fun if you can’t play them, so naturally struggling to figure out the rules can be one of the most frustrating parts of boardgaming.  Sometimes the error is on the part of us players, but in my experience, designers and publishers deserve the lion’s share of the blame. Worse, as more and more publishers “shotgun” publish games, pushing them quickly out the door to meet deadlines, the problem is getting more noticeable.  The Spiel des Jahres jury observed that they had to eliminate a record number of games from award contention in 2018 because of poor rulebooks.  

I was recently chatting with some fellow game reviewers about Charterstone, a game I gave a negative review after struggling to figure out how to even play parts of it.  They seemed skeptical of my criticism, so I pointed out that, despite it having only about 5,600 ratings on BGG, it already had more than 740 rules threads.  That’s shockingly bad: there’s a rules thread for about every 7.5 ratings.

I’ve long loved to think about data in board games, and I’ve gotten better at pulling BGG data, so I started gathering as much info as I could about rule quality.  I call the metric I adopted the “Rule Quality Index” (RQI), mostly because I needed a shorthand to refer to the calculation in this article.  RQI is simply the number of ratings a board game has divided by the number of rules threads a game has inspired. It’s a crude way to evaluate the problem, but it’s the best method I could think of.  

What follows is my attempt at empirically evaluating rule quality among the BGG top 100, plus some other categories of games.  This is my effort at shedding some light on what I see as a growing problem. Continue reading →