Appreciation post: that rulebook clarification on turn order that took me 4 playthroughs to notice

Ran into a problem where I kept losing at Scythe because I missed a single sentence about how combat works when you're behind in popularity, and it took me roughly 6 hours and 3 separate forum deep dives to finally spot the exact wording on page 12 of the rulebook, has anyone else spent way too long hunting for one buried sentence?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_skyler1d ago

Ha! Yeah that sounds about right. I spent a whole weekend trying to figure out why my Terraforming Mars games were taking forever, only to realize I had been skipping the production phase for like 3 turns in a row because I missed a tiny sentence about the order of operations. Felt like a real genius when I finally spotted it.

reese_bell1d ago

The Terraforming Mars rulebook is like 40 pages but somehow they hid the most important thing in a footnote-sized sentence on page 7. I had a friend quit the game entirely because he thought it was broken after missing that production phase order. It's almost like they want you to fail the first few times so you feel like you earned it when you finally get it right. But really it's just bad layout design and nobody wants to admit it.

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nathan8511d ago

Yeah totally @the_skyler nailed it with that example. I swear board game rulebooks are written like treasure maps with half the clues missing. I read the Scythe combat rules three times before I caught that line about popularity affecting battle damage. It's always that one sentence buried between two boring paragraphs about resource placement. Makes you wonder if they hide stuff on purpose just to mess with us.