I have been writing rules lately.

It is a lot harder than I thought.

It’s not that I haven’t written rules before. I’ve made several games before this one and I wrote out rules for most of them, but a lot of these games were built solely around decks of cards so there weren’t too many complex, out of the ordinary things to explain. I mostly had to focus on things like when to draw, when to discard, or when to play a card. And if you have simple enough concepts for your game mechanics it’s pretty easy to put them to words. Also, if you don’t end up publishing the game who’s really going to fault you for writing bad rules?

But I do intend to publish Cutthroat Fruit Merchant at some point and while I feel like the rules are pretty easy to understand and remember, it’s particularly difficult to try and explain some of these concepts in text when I can’t demonstrate directly how they work. And I might not always be available if someone wants to ask me to elaborate. Furthermore, I’m trying to do that while keeping the rules concise so as to not be overwhelming.

It is hard.

So here are some of my thoughts on writing rules and my experience as I go through this process.

I think a good first place to start is establishing the goal and setting of the game. This is a fairly common opening for board game instructions and it allows players to know what they should be focusing on, it allows them to start considering strategy as they’re learning the rules, and it gives them a sense of purpose by getting them involved in the story of the game. For me, it allows me to think in detail about the layout of the game. Just the placement of all the pieces gets me in the mindset of how I’m going to explain the function of each facet of the game and the order in which they should be explained.

Which brings me to the first type of mechanic that one must explain, Conceptual Mechanics. Concepts can be difficult enough to explain in person, let alone in text. One that I’ve been really struggling with for CFM is the piracy mechanic. It’s actually pretty simple and, in my opinion, intuitive.

At least I think it’s pretty intuitive for gamer types.

The way piracy works is that everyone in the game doesn’t start as a pirate, they start as a merchant. To become a pirate you need to commit acts of piracy. One way to do this is to use one of the instant play cards, known as Provisions Cards, that incurs points toward piracy. That’s simple enough, because the card tells you.

The other way is to attack another player. And this is more complicated to explain well. There are a series of rules to take into account. The first being: If you are a Merchant or a Pirate and you attack a Merchant, you incur 1 point of piracy. Rule number 2: If you are a Merchant or Pirate and you attack a Pirate you do not incur any piracy and collect the bounty on said Pirate. Rule number 3: If either player is in a Port Space, an attack counts as 2 points of piracy.

Huh. Y’know what? I think I just figured out how to explain piracy in the game. See? I told you it was simple. And to think I had been playing around with that for an hour or so trying to figure out how best to word it.

But I think you can understand what I mean that these can be difficult to word in a concise manner that still gives all the necessary information. As I write this now I’m still considering if I’m forgetting to mention a rule for that list, because I swear it was more complicated than that. And while rereading this post I made some adjustments to those rules! I’ll settle on something eventually.

I’m just now realizing that this is a pretty long post so I am going to end it here and pick up with my thoughts in the next post that I make.

But I will tack on a few small announcements:

First, I have created a Facebook page that I will be using to make minor posts about game updates. You can check it out and like it here. For larger updates I will likely still make a post here, but you should check it out anyway!

Second, Moss has done some work on characters that will represent the different players in the game! You can see them on the home page and they look awesome! You can even watch him drawing them on his livestream. Go give him some love!

And speaking of streaming, Moss, Kari, and I all got together on our shared livestream and played a game of Cutthroat Fruit Merchant! You can check it out here. Do be aware that there is some foul language as we tend to get a little rowdy when we’re streaming.

Stay tuned for Rules: Part 2!