Confessions of a Rules Slob

The big new game I got for Christmas was Perikles. We played it for the first time Wednesday night.

On Thursday, the e-mails began.

Dave, our rules lawyer, pointed out two or three rules that I got wrong when teaching the game. None of these rules mistakes or omissions prevented us from playing the game, but they may have hindered us from getting the complete Perikles experience that Martin Wallace intended.

You see, if Dave is our rules lawyer, then I am his opposite. I am a rules slob.

Heaven knows I try. I read the Perikles rules twice. And we referred to the rules while playing to double-check a few things. But I always seem to forget a detail or two. Sometimes an important detail or two.

I think age is a factor. I wasn’t always a rules slob. Back in my teenage SPI-playing days, I could suck up the driest wargame prose and study the details with the attention-span of a Talmudic scholar.

Those were the days when I knew the details of every Columbo episode: who the killer was, what the murder method was, and what his fatal mistake was. Mind you, I never tried to memorize that information. It just stuck to my fly-paper mind. Now all I can remember is that a lot of episodes starred Jack Cassidy and Robert Culp. I can’t even remember a book I read to my daughter recently. Last night, I asked my wife what book she read our daughter to put her to sleep.

My wife said: “The book about the penguin.”

“Penguin?” Did we own such a book?

My wife went on to describe the plot in detail. Finally, it began to sound vaguely familiar, and I realized that I had read that very book to my daughter at some point.

Probably, last week. I can’t remember.

But back to being a rules slob. Often this is a harmless malady. Often it just means keeping a copy of the rule book handy.

But there have been times when forgetting a rule can derail a whole game. The Appalachian Gamers tried playing Conquest of the Empire (with the Martin Wallace rules) for the first time. It was my game—so I explained the rules. I got most of them correct. But I mistakenly thought that players collected taxes every turn instead of only once per campaign. Everyone was soon awash in gold. I realized that I had done something wrong when players had every single one of their military units on the board. We stopped the game, and haven’t yet tried to play it again. (It may be first game ever called on account of excessive bounty). I’m afraid I may have tainted the CotE experience for some people with my rules goofs.

I suppose I’m lucky to have a rules lawyer in our group who can steer me back toward the path of righteousness. At least I will learn that I did something wrong, and won’t embarrass myself by someday arriving at a game convention, and sitting down to play Perikles with an incomplete set of rules in my head.

I could recite other examples of my rules failings. In fact, I could probably write an article titled Kris’s Accidental Poor-Memory Variants. But what’s the point?

You understand the rules slob syndrome. You may have a rules slob in your gaming group. You may even be one yourself.

If you know a rules slob, I counsel patience. We’re trying our best.

If you are a rules slob, then encourage others to read the rules of your games, too. If the rules are long, then maybe assign different players to read certain sections. Just to keep you honest. Just to give you a helping hand.

I try to do that with every complicated game.

If I remember.