Last month a manuscript came across my desk with an index that had clearly been generated automatically and never touched by a human afterward, forty page references under the entry “cognition” with no sub-entries, which is functionally useless, you’d have better luck just rereading the whole book. I sent it back with a list of what the author actually needed, grouped sub-entries, cross-references, the works, and while I was writing that email I realized I’d made almost the exact same list two weeks earlier for a board game.

That game was one I won’t name here because the review’s already up and I don’t need to pile on twice, but the short version is the rulebook buried the one rule that actually mattered, how a specific resource interacts with a specific building, in a sidebar on page eleven instead of in the section where you’d naturally look for it, and our table burned twenty minutes on round two arguing about something that should’ve taken zero minutes if the book had been organized around how people actually play instead of how the designer happened to think about the system while writing it.

Nine years doing this for a living, and it turns out most of what I actually do isn’t fixing sentences, it’s asking “where will a reader actually look for this,” which is a completely different skill than writing clearly in the first place, plenty of very good writers are terrible at organizing information for someone who doesn’t already have it in their head. A rulebook has the same problem, worse actually, because nobody’s going to sit down and read it linearly for pleasure, they’re going to flip to it mid-game with a specific question and a little bit of frustration already loaded in.

I don’t think this makes me a more forgiving reviewer of rulebooks. If anything it’s made me less forgiving, because I know exactly what fixing it would have cost, an afternoon, maybe two, reorganizing around actual play patterns instead of design logic. It’s cheap to do right. Most of the annoyance I feel at a bad one isn’t really about the rules at all, it’s about knowing someone had the time to fix it and didn’t.

The other thing I’ve started noticing, now that I’m looking for it, is that the good rulebooks in my collection almost all share a specific habit, they tell you where you’ll need to come back later, upfront, in the first read. Something like “you won’t need this table until round three, skip it for now,” which is such a small courtesy and so rarely done, most designers seem to assume you’ll either read the whole thing cover to cover before playing or flip back mid-game with no guidance at all, and both of those are worse than just being told in advance which parts to hold onto.

I brought this observation up with Priya, half expecting her to find it a little much, comparing a board game manual to an academic manuscript with a straight face, but she pointed out that she does something similar with dense theoretical texts, flagging which sections a reader can skip on a first pass without losing the argument. Apparently this isn’t a board game problem or an academic publishing problem, it’s just what happens whenever someone writes a document meant to be referenced rather than read straight through, and almost nobody designing that kind of document thinks about the referencing part until it’s already too late to fix cheaply.