esoteric board game rules templating review, please
I'm working on a card game that would arrive to your home without a rulebook, but I'm having a comprehensibility problem. Below is some basic rules text for this game. If you had enough time to decipher the below, do you believe you could understand its meaning? Are there any words which are too obscure?
Join a game by selecting a central objective from among its currently apparent contests. Catch a turn from wherever to start playing then describe your plan aloud to the group. If anyone agrees that your plan is valid (legal?) then they can accept you into the game as their second. Anyone else who wants to join at this point may also join/rejoin as your teammate.
Contests are tensions between two scales which can be described by consensus. For example, imagine I'm 1v1 with Ah while you are on a team with Bo and Ci against Du. Imagine Du sees that the tide is not in their favor, and decides to jump ship to the other game. They may do so at any time by admitting they want out of their losing position and describing which team in the other game they would like to swing over to join (My team or Ah's.). Bo, Ci, and you are left in the boat without an opponent. This may cause a crisis (see "Crisis Card").
Farewell, I am off to prepare lunch for a child.
I'm pretty adept at reading and understanding rules from rulebooks and implementing them. I don't find this easy to comprehend. If part of the game is deciphering rules, then maybe that's acceptable, or maybe one needs the accoutrements of the game for this to make sense.
In this sentence there are several words which could mean several things, and it's very difficult to understand without more in depth clues about what is meant. Game has several meanings, objective is not obvious, and contest is not obvious, though it's possible these are all explained by the game itself. For example, if there are multiple decks and one of them has the word "OBJECTIVE" on the back and one of the decks has the word "CONTEST" on the back, then this may be obvious in the context of having received the actual game and pieces.
It gets murkier in the first paragraph as you continue, and I don't actually have any concept of how this game could progress. I don't even know if it's online or in-person.
In the second paragraph, when doing the "almanac" style example, it's generally accepted that you use example players and omit putting the reader as one of the players. I would also recommend using real names; Alice, Bob, Cathy, Dave, for example, instead of Ah, Bo, Ci, Du. This paragraph does give a bit more information, but also indicates that you may be overloading the word "game". Since it already means the entirety of the system - "let's play a game of Qisgame!" - to use it as a mechanic within the game is not a great idea if it can be avoided.
These are all generalities, and it's possible that you might want to have figuring out how to play to be a part of the game itself, in which case everything I said may not be relevant.
I see the overloading you are describing. Figuring out how to play is meant to be a ladder, yes. I think I am aiming for deliberate stall points where the game gives contradictory or too-vaguely-scoped instructions that force players to house rule the game back into function -- infrastructure for how the group should progress in the face of ambiguity is a focus of much of the deck (and it is indeed meant to be an in person game, for analog negotiation.)
Hmm...
I am a board game player and designer, and I agree with @aphoenix that the paragraphs of rules that you posted above are pretty incomprehensible without (and possibly even with) additional context.
I feel that unless this is a very clearly advertised part of the game experience (on the box and in all marketing material), this will be generally unpleasant for most players. I would personally consider this a defect of any board/card game that is not meant to be some sort of "experimental" or "art piece" game.
I will be far too shy to attempt to publish a work of such description, surely. What are your games tho, this is your first post since before the pandemic and I wonder if you like me have had a hard time getting good games to the table this year