More About Rules Complexity

In a previous post, I talked about ways rules complexity can eat away at your complexity budget. I want to delve a little further into my point about memory. 

When I play games with my parents, my father has an especially hard time learning the rules. He doesn't have a lot of experience with board games and only plays them when I am around. There are several lessons about rules complexity that I can glean from trying to teach my dad any number of supposedly gateway games. 

The biggest one is that number of steps matters. Quick turns with fewer distinct action options is by far the best method for lighter weight games. Where I think designers can get tripped up is that we are unconsciously chunking a number of steps into a single unit. Chunking allows experienced gamers to learn games faster when familiar elements are present. However, designers cannot rely on chunking when teaching new players, particularly at the beginning of the game, because every player will have a different set of game experiences to draw from. Instead we must view every mechanism as its component parts. Deck building, for example, is a mechanism that includes card drawing, playing, acquisition, and shuffling. That's a minimum of four steps before you include any other rules. Worse, card shuffling may not occur every turn. Any step that does not occur every turn should be considered higher in memory load than the steps that occur every turn. 

Games where base rules are quite simple and the complexity is revealed via board state or conditions on cards are generally easier on new learners, with some caveats. Number of icons should be considered a part of rules complexity. Each icon is a piece of meaning that has a relationship to the rules that must be memorized (or listed on the player aid). Intuitive icons can decrease rules complexity—like a hammer to represent a building action—but very rarely will this be true of all icons in a game. The worst offenders are space-themed games that have no intuitive icons whatsoever. 

One way to know that you have exceeded your complexity budget is if your intended audience cannot pay attention to their progress toward the endgame because their attention is wholly focused on the procedure of taking each turn as it occurs. Not every game needs to be mastered on a first play, but turn procedure should be sufficiently clear after the first few turns. 

If you are designing for more casual audiences (or looking to reduce memory load), don't hide endgame scoring conditions in the rulebook. Make sure all scoring is represented in some way on the table, even if some conditions are represented by face down cards. Having to check the rulebook to find out who won at the end of a game is a bummer for new and casual players. 

I'm a fan of games that you can learn as you play, especially with casual players who aren't used to a long teach. However, even some casual players would prefer a full rules explanation to just getting started. Either way, reducing memory load is an important design step to making a game easier to learn. And remember that you cannot rely on chunking when writing rules. 

Generally speaking, games have more rules than designers think they do. This affects how easy they are to learn and the overall perceived complexity. Awareness of this issue can help you to tailor your design to your intended audience. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Nov 12-19 I will be at Tabletop Network and BGGcon in Dallas. Stop by the Unpub room if you're there.