I think that just about any board gamer can agree that rules are hard. Learning games, reading through rule books, and ensuring you don’t miss edge cases is challenging. Even when the rule book is perfectly laid out, has an excellent index, is completely coherent, and leaves nothing open to interpretation, it depends on the reader, the player to not have any reading comprehension issues while taking in all the rules and then regurgitating them to the rest of the table. I don’t think there is a single person I know who would dare make the claim that they have never messed up a rule in a game.
So now we have gotten a rule wrong…how much does it ruin your experience? I think the best situation is if it is a co-op game. If you got a rule wrong and lost because of it you can feel bad about it but you also recognize that your loss wasn’t necessarily your fault, if you win then yet again whatever, you get to try it again later and you want it to be harder so it makes you want to try the game again. Some games are a bit more on the complex and involved side, for example, I will admit that I don’t think I have ever played Spirit Island perfectly correctly. I’ve made mistakes like not clearing damage by the end of the round, or forgetting when you were supposed to pay for your cards or all kinds of different issues. All of these incidents just made me want to play more so that I could for once play correctly.
On the other hand in a competitive game messing up rules has the chance to really sour people’s view of the game. Usually, when you mess up a rule in a competitive environment it benefits one player at the expense of others. The worst case scenario is that it benefits the rules explainer (which is generally me as resident Game Daddy) because it seems very difficult for the other players to not see it as even slightly intentional. I usually find myself combing through the rulebook if I feel that a rule is one that I am taking advantage of to make sure that it works properly. I have previously stated that my main goal when I put a game in front of people is to make sure they want to play with me again. As you can messing up the rules can easily make it difficult to convince people to do that again.
Once in a while though, a competitive game can survive having the rules messed up. And that is what this post is truly about. I got a rule wrong in a game, in fact, I have now played the game five times, and each time I played I got it wrong. I first played another person’s copy of the game and was taught it incorrectly. Afterward, I received this game in a trade and unfortunately, it came in French. I do not read French, I can only read English. Now the game itself is actually language-independent but every time I read the rules I did so on my phone which apparently does not allow me to ingest rules explanations as well as I would like. That being said, I have enjoyed every single play of this game even with the wrong rules. The game that was able to accomplish this herculean feat is Hansa Teutonica.
Hansa Teutonica is a mean game, a very mean game. The game itself encourages you to be mean with a specific rule, it costs players extra effort to move players from spaces they want to go to and at no penalty to the player that is being removed (they just get to place their piece elsewhere). The mistake that I made is not only do you get to place your removed piece when you get displaced but you get to place an extra piece from your general supply (which normally you need to take an extra action to move into your “good supply”) which means it is even more advantageous than before to get in peoples way. Ultimately this actually means our games were slower than they should have been, as fewer pieces got placed out due to our mistake. There would have been more blocking and more meanness if we followed the rules. The fact that the game didn’t fall apart, that we were not deterred by the game, and that I managed to convince players to play it multiple times with me even with this mistake is a miracle of game design by Andreas Steding.
The real moral of the story though is that I should probably stop reading any rules for board games on my phone…..print or bust.