Recently I had the pleasure of picking the brain of Joshua Yearsley, an Editor and Developer working for Leder Games. And while his name might not be familiar, his fingerprints are plastered over some of the best board games ever made including Root, Marvel Champions: The Card Game, and Trajan.
What started innocently enough as a request to answer some questions, turned into a deep and insightful conversation around board game development.
Josh’s passion for the hobby, and his craft has no bounds. His tale of entrepreneurship and getting a full-time gig in the hobby is inspiring, making this back-and-forth a fascinating read for all.
But enough of the beat-up. Let’s get into it!
Hi Josh, thanks for your time with this. To begin with I’d love to know your story about getting into the industry. Most of us dream about leaving our desk jobs and working full time on the hobby, but you’ve made it a reality. When did you realise you could become a full-time editor?
I got interested in editing while in graduate school for materials science and engineering, around 2012. Most of my labmates hated writing and editing their research papers and dissertations, but I loved it, so I ended up editing a bunch of people’s work over the years. As time passed, I was also becoming disillusioned with a future as a professor—the job market looked hellish, for one—so I decided to tell my adviser that I wanted to stop with a master’s degree. She was very gracious and asked what kind of work I wanted to do, and I told her that I wanted to work in science publishing. She was an editor-in-chief of a science journal, so she offered me a freelance copy-editing gig at the journal on the spot.
Around this time, Kickstarter was really taking off in funding tabletop games. For Kickstarter’s first few years, video games got more funding than tabletop, but I believe this flipped in 2012 or 2013. So I took a look around the crowdfunding world and guessed that many teams lacked editors. This turned out to be right! And funnily enough, I got my first game editing gig—for Nova Praxis—on the back of my science background. Mike, the designer, liked that I both had technical editing experience and could fact-check at least some of the science in the book.
Over the years, the balance of my science editing and games editing shifted toward games. Within a couple years I was split 50/50, and then after a few more years I was fully working in games. All in all, I worked freelance full-time for a bit over seven years, and then I became a full-time developer and editor at Leder Games. So, working in the games industry full-time was a process that took many years.
When it comes to rulebooks, everyone seems to have their own style. Some are very matter-of-fact here’s the rules. While others, and I’m thinking of Cosmic Frog, go the other way and bring in so much flavour it almost distracts from the learning process. How does the style of the rulebook get decided?
The first thing to know about rulebook work is that it looks very different from publisher to publisher—there is a wide range in how much the designer is involved, how much say the editor has over the rulebook or even the design itself, how much time is available, whether usability testing can be done, and when the editor is brought into the project. I’ve worked on projects where I have full control and the designer isn’t involved, usually because the publisher just bought the design rights and the designer isn’t involved much anymore. On other projects, I’ve had limited say and could only submit suggestions. On still others, I’ve deeply collaborated with the designer almost from the game’s conception. Sometimes, I’ve only gotten a week to do one editing pass. Other times, I’ve worked for close to a year in more of a combined development and editing capacity.
Flavor can be helpful if the game’s world is different from our own world and doesn’t just use clear genre tropes like zombies or vampires. If your game world is full of massive world-eating frogs, for example, you probably need to contextualize things a little bit. Cosmic Frog indulges in thematic explanation to an extreme, but including a lot of flavor doesn’t necessarily have to make learning harder.
Take a look at roleplaying games—it’s convention to use quite a lot of the rulebook to explain the world—way more than basically any board game rulebook—but a good roleplaying book can do this without distracting from the rules. It all depends on how much flavor is required to intuit how the world works and where you put the flavor.
If you have a ton of flavor that’s not strictly necessary to understand the mechanics, you might even put it in its own book! One example of this is A Feast for Odin, which has an entire book dedicated to Viking culture and how the game relates to it. Wargames also put a lot of historical context and further reading in their playbooks, separate from their rulebooks.
If you had carte blanche over what the rule book. What would be your preferred style?
This might be unsatisfying, but it depends on the game. I could talk all day about this, so let’s focus on one element of rulebook style—context. As I alluded to, I think “How should I use flavor?” is part of the larger question “How should I add context?” As your game gets more intricate, sandboxy, and unconventional, you gotta add more context! Sometimes that means leaning into the flavor, sometimes not.
Let’s take some examples from Oath. Early in Oath’s development, we released a print-and-play version and got some pretty negative feedback about the rulebook. Among that feedback, the most potent, useful response was “It feels like you’re trying to hide all the weird stuff.” This insight was right on the money! Make no mistake—Oath is a weird game, and even though the weirdness serves its design goals, the weirdness still makes the game harder to understand. And glossing over the weirdness by presenting it straightforwardly wasn’t helping! In the final playbook, we not only do a better job of reiterating weird rules and linking them explicitly to the thematic context, but we actually have a section at the back of the playbook called “Weird Things About Oath.”
Oath also plays with abstract ideas in unfamiliar ways, so it needed to rely on uncommon terms. There are people called Usurpers and Citizens and Exiles and Oathkeepers and such, and pieces like secrets and denizens and even the Banner of the People’s Favor. What the heck is all that? To help with this, the playbook gives a thematic introduction that connects all of the roles and ways to win in one page spread, and it gives a short explanation of every piece and what it represents in the world. Finally, Oath is a sandbox game, so you have tons of things you can do at a time, and the same action or power might be useful or useless in different situations. To help with this, the playbook has an extensive “Why do I want to do this?” sidebar for each action. At first, I was worried that readers would find this patronizing, but people overwhelmingly loved it! Additionally, the walkthrough in the playbook uses a call-and-response style that first presents a player’s action and then contextualizes it by describing how it connects to other parts of the game, serves a specific strategy, or breaks some convention of board game mechanics.
Oh yeah, the walkthrough. It was great at teaching the game, but reading it aloud as we went through meant it took us a long time before we started playing.
For sure—no method is without its downsides. Oath is just such a rich, weird, and deeply interconnected game that you can’t lean on many prior experiences to learn it, so you need to highlight a lot of fun and funny stuff in a gradual way.
Speaking of Oath, I’d love to know about how much influence Kyle Ferrin’s art has on the tone of the game? Kyle seems to have found this whimsical style of art, which seems opposite of Cole Wehrle’s designs which are usually drenched in historical accuracy. Yet Oath, and its rules, seem to be closer to Kyle’s style than Cole’s. Specifically talking about Root and Oath, who makes the decision on the tone, and how does that affect the rulebook?
Whenever Cole designs a game at Leder Games, he’ll sit down with Kyle very early in the project for some worldbuilding sessions. They’ll jam on what the world should feel like and what inspirations they want to draw from, and ultimately this helps Kyle to create concept art and make the vision concrete. However, the first bits of concept art that Kyle makes often don’t represent the final style. For example, Oath’s art style was much more—Nordic? That’s the best way I can describe it. If you want to see some examples, Kyle talks a bunch about this process for Oath on this art stream. So it’s a joint venture!
Thinking about historical accuracy, Cole lives two design lives, one with his own publisher, Wehrlegig Games, and one with Leder Games. But I think all of Cole’s designs, regardless of publisher, are concerned with history. Both of Cole’s designs for Leder Games—Root and Oath—still examine historical processes, but in a whimsical, lighter form that do not demand accuracy so much as verisimilitude. Root is concerned with the rise and fall of governments, how different political systems operate, and how asymmetric war might happen. Oath is concerned with how history is written and forgotten, and how empires compose and decompose as they accept and reject different peoples.
The rulebook’s tone definitely draws from the game’s tone, but a game’s tone in turn draws from the studio’s tone, so I think that every Leder Games rulebook that I write ends up taking in a little of that. Pretty much everyone at Leder Games is a silly person in the best way, so even though many of our games deal with pretty heavy subject matter—war, oppression, politics, history—we still like to inject humor. Look at the Coffin Makers card from Root’s Exiles & Partisans Deck. It shows a lizard bursting out of a coffin being finished up—“Whoa! What’s the deal?! Someone’s in here!” I think we do this because even dark parts of history contain levity and absurdity—consider the Christmas Truce in World War I, where German and British troops played soccer and gave each other haircuts in exchange for cigarettes. Humor, properly applied, keeps people alive and lively.
But humor isn’t the whole point—it’s just one part, so sometimes a different tone is needed. For example, in Oath I wrote short introductions to the six suits in its Law, the rules reference. (Even a rules reference shouldn’t be a completely dry document!) Here’s one, for the Arcane suit: “Bright lights in the night sky. Starry-eyed discovery and esoteric tradition. Sights not to be seen, sounds not to be heard. Fulminating, fuming, free.” Each suit represents a theme or driving force in Oath’s world, and this exemplifies its curious and mysterious part—you’ll see this on the box cover too, with a seemingly endless landscape stretching into the background. We could have just said “this suit has these kinds of cards,” but we wanted to set a mood: Oath has a big wide world with weird inhabitants and ideas that you’ve yet to discover, and this mood is supported by these impressionistic, almost poetic suit descriptions.
Taking a step back, your last blog post was 4 years ago, a great article called ‘We’re making rulebooks all wrong’. While all of the points you made still stand, how has your opinion changed or grown over time?
In that post I talk about “usability testing” as if it’s one unified method, but that’s not accurate. Rather, it’s a collection of methods where you observe users to understand how they use things, and each usability method has different answers to the questions “How many observations do I need to collect before proposing a change?” and “What kinds of observations do I want to collect?”
Usability testing originated in settings where changing a prototype took lots of time, cost lots of money, and added lots of risk, such as in airplanes and intricate mainframe computers. So, traditional usability techniques tend to collect results from many tests before proposing possible fixes. Over time, though, more and more usability work has started happening in the digital realm, and we’ve gotten better at producing and testing prototypes faster, cheaper, and safer—think of techniques like 3D printing and computer simulation. Because of this, usability practitioners have increasingly pushed the boundaries of rapid testing and iteration when it’s feasible and useful—and often it isn’t!
So over time, I’ve diversified my usability techniques to answer “How many observations?” and “What kinds of observations?” in more ways, depending on the needs of the game.
What are you doing differently these days? What techniques have you introduced to ensure you’re producing a quality outcome?
While working on Ahoy, our current project, I’ve started including what I’ll call instant iteration and validation. In this method, I’ll run a usability playtest where players are trying to learn the game using only the aid components. I’ll keep the aids—such as the player boards and quickstart booklet—loaded in layout software on my laptop in front of me. When the players really struggle to interpret a rule, I’ll take a moment to consider what’s causing the issue or ask them to talk through it, then I’ll edit the text that they’re confused about, show them the new text on my laptop without explanation, and ask them to interpret it again. In an ideal situation, this lets me test immediately whether your change clarifies the problem, which can save a lot of time and let me focus on other problems in my next test.
But this method has some limitations: First, it only really works in person—it’s just too hard to change something and show the new version to the players remotely. Second, it only works if you don’t give away the correct interpretation. This is true in all usability testing, but it is especially difficult to keep silent and neutral when you’re making and presenting changes on the fly, and sometimes the timing of when you make the change will give things away. If your player can guess what the correct answer is from your actions, rather than the text, you won’t know if the change actually helped anything—it might have actually made the problem worse, which is especially dangerous later in the process. Third, this method is applicable in board games only because you can change plain text on the fly; it would be much harder or even impossible with other products.
It also has some downsides: If you’re focusing on fixing the problem so you can test the change immediately, it’s easy to forget to write down the problem itself. If you’re not writing things down, it’s much harder to sit down later and synthesize those problems into insights and learn from your mistakes over the long term. Likewise, you might miss an opportunity to solve the problem at a deeper level by changing the rule itself, which you generally can’t do until after the test by collaborating with the designer. All that said, it’s a good method to add to my toolkit, and many of these issues can be alleviated by having a second team member present to take down notes.
As I mentioned above, different usability methods have different answers to “What kinds of observations do I want to collect?” For example, you might do a simple rulebook read—just put a rulebook in front of someone and say, “Read this and talk about your thoughts and confusions aloud.” This is the method I described in my blog post. It’s quick, simple, and effective, letting you rapidly iterate the rulebook with many individual tests, but it only tells you about the person’s thoughts, not their actions. They could say they understand something, but they could have misinterpreted it without realizing.
… and so ends Part 1 of the interview.
Continue onwards to read Part 2.
I can’t thank Josh enough for having this conversation. If you’re interested in reading more of Josh’s thoughts, then read his blog. Otherwise, you can catch his work later this year with Leder Games, who’ve announced two new games in 2022: Ahoy and Arcs.
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