The nine sections of a rulebook, in the order a new player needs them.
A rulebook is read by three people: the one teaching the game for the first time, the one learning it at the table while someone else explains, and the one looking something up at eleven at night to settle an argument. The same nine sections serve all three, in the same order, because the order is the order a new player needs the information: what am I doing, what is in the box, how do I set it up, what do I do on a turn, what happens after everyone has had one, when does it end, who won, what about the odd cases, and what did that word mean. Here are the nine, each with what it holds, using the invented Lantern Moths draft from the sample rewrite.
1. Overview
What the game is, for how many, how long, what you are trying to do and how it ends — in one paragraph, before a single rule. A new player cannot hold a rule until they know what it is for. “Each player is a moth keeper. Over several rounds you plant moths in a shared garden and light wicks to draw them to your lantern. When the night ends, the keeper whose lantern holds the most valuable moths wins.”
2. Components
Every piece with its count, in one list, before setup mentions any of them. The draft named the 48-card deck, the 6 Dusk cards, the tiles and the wicks across four paragraphs; a reader opening the box for the first time needs them in one place, so that setup can say “the 6 Dusk cards” and be understood.
3. Setup
Numbered steps, in the order the hands do them, each naming a component from the list above. A rule that only applies later (“the Dusk cards enter after round 2”) gets a cross-reference, not a paragraph: “Set the 6 Dusk cards aside. They enter the game after round 2 (see The night ends).”
4. The turn
Turn order, then how many actions, then each action in its own paragraph with its whole rule in it. The draft’s Plant rule continued three paragraphs later under “one more thing”; in the rewrite the two halves sit together. A player reading Plant should finish Plant.
5. End of round
What happens when every player has had a turn, as numbered steps in order: who takes what, what resets, who draws, who starts next. This is the section most drafts fold into the turn, and it is the section a table argues about at eleven at night.
6. The game end
The trigger, stated once, and what happens when it fires: finish the round or stop dead. The draft said “when a dusk card is drawn”; the rewrite says what happens on the fourth, what happens if the deck runs out first, and that the current round is finished either way, with the end-of-round steps.
7. Scoring
Every point source as its own line, then the tie-break, in order. Only the current rule: the draft’s crossed-out Ghost Moth scoring (“no wait we changed that”) does not appear. A tie-break that says “share the win” is a rule; a scoring section with no tie-break is a question.
8. Edge cases
The answers from the draft’s “things people asked”, each placed beside the rule it belongs to, and the rest collected here: lighting an empty tile, two wicks on one tile, what a full tile means for a Ghost Moth. Also what is not included — 5 players, solo — said plainly so nobody plays a rule that was never written.
9. Index of terms
Every capitalised word the rules use, defined in one line: Deck, Discard pile, Dusk card, Full tile, Garden, Ghost Moth, Grey tile, Lantern, Lit wick, Round, Set. A new player who has forgotten what a Lit wick is should not have to re-read The turn to find out.
Why this order and not the draft’s
Most drafts are written in the order the designer thought of the rules, which is the order the game was designed in: the clever bit first, then the components it needs, then setup, then “oh and one more thing” three times. That order is right for the designer and wrong for everyone else, because every later section depends on an earlier one — setup needs the components, the turn needs the setup, scoring needs the turn — and a reader who meets a term before its definition reads the rest of the page holding a question.
What the rewrite does not do
- It does not add a rule. Where the draft can be read two ways, the rewrite keeps the designer’s words and lists the question at the end, undecided — seven of them for Lantern Moths.
- It does not change a number, a count or a name.
- It does not play the game. The reorder is done from the words; whether the game is good is the designer’s job and the playtesters’.
Three questions.
Does a short game need all nine?
A 20-minute card game needs all nine and most of them are a paragraph. The index of terms for a small game is six lines; the edge cases are three. What a short game does not need is for any of the nine to be missing, because the question a missing section would have answered gets asked at the table anyway.
Where do the pictures go?
Beside the rule they illustrate, once the words are in order: the setup diagram under Setup, a turn example under The turn. Layout comes after the reorder, not before. We deliver the words in the nine-section order as a .docx and a text file; the designer or their layout person places the art.
What if my game has phases, or players with different roles?
The nine hold. A game with phases has The turn split into the phases in order; a game with asymmetric roles has one paragraph per role inside The turn and the shared rules above it. What does not change is that components come before setup, and setup before any turn.
Get the sample rewrite first
The invented Lantern Moths rulebook before and after as a PDF, and our one-page list of the nine sections a rulebook needs and the order a new player reads them.
Download the nine-sections list now (PDF, one page, 143 KB) — no email needed.
Your draft, up to about 4,000 words, put into the nine-section order in plain English within two days, with a change log and the questions we could not decide for you, $79 / £63 / A$119 / C$105. No rule is added or changed; we do not play the game.