Lockdown

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• Nemesis is not a stealth game.
• I'm just in sheer panic mode.
• This is just crap. You can just bring whatever you want. This is stupid.
• The map is already out where in this one you don't know where the map is.
• It's like four games in one. And it's out of control.
• It was a ton of fun until we fought the labyrinth dude for the first time because we had no idea how to deal with the labyrinth tiles I was putting on.
• It's hard. That's a hard game.
• I'm still paying painting my chronicle of Dungore.
• We have shareholders. You must buy more stuff.
• The first rule was assemble your army. pick some models you want to play with and put them on the board.
• Finecast. Yeah, that was that a lot of people called that fail cast. Yeah, that did not go. That did not go so well.
• Slap and drop, and let them flop.
• My backpack's done. I didn't have to do any special nine shades of mixing and all this stuff.
• I'm going to use some bronze here. Not that one.
• It's about it. Unless you do adept as custodians like I did. I only had to buy one battle battle box and it was 100,000 points where like most armies in a battle box you get like three to 500 points.
• It's amazing how much more feeling or ambiance I guess you get playing playing with painted miniatures than just gray.
• We have shareholders. You must buy more.
• Welcome to Games Workshop.
• The queue never ends. It just keeps on growing.
• I was playing Warhammer the other day with my son and only half my armor is painted. I'm like just doesn't feel right seeing like a group of great into the battlefields like oh I want those guys to die.
• It's really good detail for for that plastic.
• Slop, drop, and let them flop.
• I had so many night goblins, it was out of control, dude.
• We are currently unsettled. We're not unsettled on unsettled.

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Quotes (from this video)

• Great games shipped with terrible rulebooks.
• The problem isn't the design, it's the documentation.
• When the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
• The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience.
• This isn't getting better. We're not talking about ancient games... we're talking about high production releases from the last few years that arrived with rulebooks that simply do not work.
• That's not a learning curve, that is a wall.
• The rulebook tried as hard as it could to hide all the weird stuff.
• The cruelty of it is the context. This is a re-release.
• A reprint is supposed to be your second bite at the apple, your chance to sand down every rough edge.
• The BGG threads at launch were just flooded with rules questions, and people were asking whether later retail copies shipped with a corrected version, which is the most damning signal a rulebook can possibly send.
• The publisher rewrites the rulebook and releases the new version as a paid product.
• The irony is doing some heavy lifting there. That's almost too perfect.
• Players blame themselves first.
• And that is the real damage of a bad rulebook. It makes people feel stupid.
• There is a difference between density and dysfunction.
• A good rulebook scaffolds complexity. It layers information in the order a player needs it.
• The structure is so dense and so poorly sequenced that you consistently have to read it multiple times across multiple sessions before anything coheres.
• Community-built rule summaries became the standard learning tool, more reliable and more frequently consulted than the rulebook the game shipped with.
• More than a decade after release, the standard recommendation for new players is still to skip the rule book and watch a video tutorial first, which is a clear signal that the official documentation never became trustworthy enough to stand on its own.
• That's not an FAQ, that is a corrective supplement to a deficient primary document.
• That's what bad rule books generate, this cottage industry of third-party fixes that should never have been necessary.
• At some point, a pattern is a policy.
• The rule book was written for people who already know how to play.
• A game asking players to invest significantly in both time and money should not require that players outsource explanation to volunteer fans online.
• Simplicity is no protection.
• Writing a clear rule book is a separate skill from designing a clear game.
• When you've spent that much money and waited that long, opening the box to find a document that cannot explain how to play feels like a betrayal of the implicit contract between publisher and backer.
• Complexity is not an excuse for poor structure.
• Game designers are not naturally positioned to ask that question because they already know everything. They need editors who do not.
• Professional technical writers exist. Rule book editors exist as a dedicated specialty within the hobby now.
• Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation, and players will keep arriving at what should have been a great first session armed with a document that sets them up to fail.
• Every single game we've talked about today is worth playing.
• The rulebook failures we've documented are a reason to seek out community tutorials and third-party summaries and how to play videos before your first session. They are not a reason to avoid the games entirely.
• The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience. And when the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
• The Conan rule books were universally panned, and that experience cost Monolith both bad press and the additional expense of rewriting and posting replacement rule books to backers.
• That's the line that should be tattooed on every studio's wall. A game designer understands their game completely and intuitively, which is exactly why they are poorly positioned to write the document that explains it to someone with zero context.
• Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation...

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