Developing the rule book

I’ve dedicated a lot of time today to developing the rule book for Counter Attack. There is probably better fun to be had on a Sunday…

Nevertheless, I have achieved what I set out to do, and now the game has a fully illustrated rule book that is ready to send to the printers!

At 16 A5 pages, I’m a little worried about the size of the rule book. The Settlers of Catan rule book is also 16 pages long (and that’s in A4!), so maybe I shouldn’t stress about this. Football is a complicated sport with a bunch of rules! Trying to replicate such a dynamic sport in a board game inevitably generates a lot of information. I’m just worried about overwhelming new players.

Here’s a few screenshots of the rulebook:

I designed the rule book in Illustrator, where most of my design work on this game has been done. I’m fairly familiar with the software but initially I made a bundle of beginner errors, like resizing images in Illustrator rather than in Photoshop. Then I had some doubt about whether to use photographs of the game or computer-generated images for those moments when I give examples of how to play. In the end I plumped for photographs, like these little fellas below:

Next up, I need to print the rules out as a trial and then run them past a proofreader. I imagine my work today is only one step towards the final product, but it feels damned good to have made it this far today!