Rule the Waves

Last night I played The Kaiser's Pirates for the first time. The game is set in WWI and involves each player having control of three German 'pirate' vessels and three merchant vessels. Each turn players use can cards to active their pirate vessels, to try and sink merchant vessels, or play cards representing the British navy to try and sink opposing pirate vessels. After a few turn you get the hang of how things work and the game is relatively simple, except the way that the rules and card text are written is often counter-intuitive and confusing. Also the colour palette used is quite pale and as such, although you can tell that your cards have different coloured backgrounds, you're not sure which is which.

An example of a poorly worded card is QQQ the text on which reads 'Automatically recognizes a Raider after it intercepts a Merchantman.' This seems simple enough, however, when I tried to play it I was informed that I couldn't because it wasn't my Merchantman being attacked and a Reaction Card can only be played in response to your ships being attacked. To make matter worse if you look in the rule book it says:
REACTION AND ASSIST CARDS: Some cards are “Reaction” cards, which are played in response to another player’s Action card, or are “Assist” cards, which are only played in combination with an Intercept!, Raider Mine attack, or submarine torpedo or mine attack. See section 3.3 for a summary explanation of all Action cards.
And if you go to section 3.3 it makes no mention of the only when you are attacked rule, but rather just has the card text for every card printed out. The relevant rule is 3.2.2 which states 'Reaction cards are played directly from the defending player’s hand in response to an Action card.'

This issue could easy be avoided by better wording on the cards. Changing QQQ to read 'Automatically recognizes a Raider after it intercepts a Merchantman under your control', although rules wise redundant, prevents confusion. There were several other cards that had similar issues, often caused by the choice of language used, such as 'immediately' being used to mean 'immediately after what is happening has finished'. This experience just reminded me of how common it is for game developers to write the rules and then shortly after publication having to write an FAQ, because the instructions were not unambiguous.

The 3rd of December 2011 edition of New Scientist has an article entitled 'Time to think like a computer'. This article discusses the way that people think and communicate to each other and makes the observation that if you want to communicate with people in a clear and obvious way then you should talk like a computer, that is use conditional logic. For example rather than writing a rule which says "player's may not have more than seven cards in hand" you should write something like "if a player with seven cards in hand is instructed to draw more cards then that player draws no card". While this is more  long winded it does explain how to cope with conflicting game instructions.

I think that the reasons most developers write rules in the more trimmed down manner is because they know the rules perfectly and they think that the rule book should be engaging and fun to read. In reality the rule book is usually only read by one of the players, who then explains it to the rest and then, with the exception of checking the occasional thing, is never read again. Personally I believe that the answer is to write each rule in the short hand way but with the long winded 'logical conditional' form immediately below it.