Design Diary #5: Writing Rules and a Touch of Art

I found my push-your-luck, dice-rolling, poker game to be in relatively good shape. The game flowed well, was pretty easy to teach, and, most importantly, we had fun playing it. Now, I needed to write the rules.

I originally thought writing rules would be easy. I don't know why—I have no excuse for such a naive thought. Even games from established publishers often have rulebooks with gaps, missing edge cases, or confusing instructions.

Learning to Write Rules

The White Box Essays by Jeremy Holcomb contains some excellent advice on rules writing. The key takeaway is to write the minimum amount needed for players to understand the game. If written carefully, omitting certain information can actually make the rules more concise and easier to follow. Holcomb describes two types of rules: explicit and implicit.

• Explicit rules are direct instructions, such as "Draw one card at the end of your turn."
• Implicit rules are assumed by players based on common sense and general gaming knowledge. For example, "You cannot look at another player's hand of cards" doesn't need to be explicitly stated, as most players assume this based on typical card game etiquette.

Putting this concept into practice was surprisingly difficult. I spend much of my day considering edge cases in software development, where missing an edge case can lead to catastrophic failures. Because of this mindset, I initially wanted to document every possible scenario. I had to deliberately focus on trimming the rules down to the bare essentials.

The result? Adequate at best. I still need to test them on someone unfamiliar with the game. Writing the rules did make the game more concrete, though, and now I at least have a full, printable version—even if it's terribly ugly. You can check them out here and you can download a zip of all the content so far at the bottom of this post.

Re-Adding Actions

I wanted to add special actions back into my game—mechanics that give players a little more control over their dice rolls. I pared down my original list of action cards to just three:

• Reroll a die
• +1 or -1 to a dice total
• Swap the position of any two cards on the board

These one-time-use actions help alleviate the frustration of bad luck—whether it's pushing too far and busting or, even worse, rolling the same number twice in a row and losing your turn. Choosing when and how to use these actions adds an engaging decision point to the game.

We play tested using my old action cards but ignored the costs, each starting with one action card. It worked out well.

I also wanted to enhance the game’s visual experience. While improving aesthetics doesn't directly affect gameplay, creating something visually appealing can be motivating. I decided to give these ability tokens a thematic flair by putting them on poker chips.

Flexing (a Little) Artistic Skill

“Artistic” skill might be the wrong phrase—art takes practice, and I haven't spent much time on it. A little photography here, a ceramics class in high school, and a middle school award for a collaborative construction paper masterpiece with my good friend Kevin. That's about it. My drawings are crude—I struggle with stick figures. Designing and illustrating my games is a real challenge.

I use Affinity Designer for vector graphics. If you’re new to design, vector graphics allow infinite scaling without pixelation. Popular tools include Affinity Designer, Inkscape (free), and Adobe Illustrator. Using vector graphics ensures that if you need to resize something later, you won’t have to completely redo the artwork.

I started by watching this YouTube tutorial. While it was a bit difficult to follow, I picked up some useful tricks—like adding and subtracting layers—which helped me stumble my way through designing poker chips.

I'm skipping over many of the design decisions I had to make, such as determining chip size, margins, and bleed areas. These are topics I'll cover in another post about considerations when designing printable components. For quick prototyping, keep things simple, but if you’re aiming for print-ready artwork, you need to consider certain printing constraints.

I was really satisfied with how the poker chips turned out, but text didn’t fit on them. So, I turned to my favorite resource for game iconography: game-icons.net. Always check licensing when using external assets—game-icons.net is generous, but it still requires attribution.

I found a couple of icons that worked well and used text for the third action. Can you guess which icon represents each action?

1. Reroll a die
2. +1 or -1 to a dice total
3. Swap the position of any two cards on the board

Although they looked great printed on paper, they felt flimsy and thin. I wanted something more substantial. Enter coin capsules—used by coin collectors, these little plastic cases add weight and durability. After some research, I found that OnFireGuy offers better quality than cheaper Amazon alternatives.

A word of caution: these are difficult to reopen! This makes them overkill for quick playtesting, so I probably won’t use them often. But for a more polished prototype, they add a nice tactile experience.

Putting It All Together

I finally landed one some small rule tweaks to make all this work together and more smoothly. When using an action you flip the token over, to indicate it has been used.

During a scoring turn, all players that wish to participate put a face down chip in the center of the table. The person with the best hands gets bonus points equal to the number of chips in play. All players who participated get their chip back face up, allowing that action to be used again.

All of this simplified the bonus point scaling for multiple players, and added a way to reactivate abilities.

My blog posting has caught up to my actual design of this game, so until I make more significant breakthroughs on this design, my posts will need to be about other topics. Have a great week!

Prototype Files:

I include protype files relevant to this blog post so you can see the inner workings of ongoing designs or even try the game at this early stage. I often use the Affinity tool suite for digital workflows.

Additional Components Required:

• Standard 52 card deck
• 2 dice
• a score tracking token per player