Book Report: Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

Professional game designers write essays on topics in Board Game Design. Along the way, they get into project management, prototyping, usability, playtesting, and other good stuff. As a professional technical writer, especially appreciated the article "Writing Precise Rules" by Mike Selinker. He talks about the usual suspects: consistent-and-simple wording, etc. But his examples are different. E.g., when talking about using icons as a mnemonic for concepts,

See also the great game Race for the Galaxy, where my friend Wei-Hwa Huang laid out the cards in bizarre symbols I'm sure he completely understood. This does not mean that I do. That said, I have not asked him whether he understands Gloria Mundi's symbols.

This example is especially salient if, say, Wei-Hwa has kicked your butt at Race for the Galaxy. It tells you why you wouldn't bother asking if Wei-Hwa understands your game's symbols (since he does, of course, even if he had to reverse-engineer their meaning by learning everything else about the game first).