The Bug Report I Never Filed Against a Rulebook

I test backend systems for a logistics company for a living, which means most days I’m trying to find the exact place where something that’s supposed to work quietly stops working. So when I sat down with a new game a few weeks back and found three separate places where the rulebook contradicted itself, page nine said one thing about combat resolution and page twenty two said something that couldn’t both be true at once, my first instinct wasn’t annoyance. It was to open a ticket. Actual muscle memory, reaching for a bug tracker that doesn’t exist for a board game rulebook.

I didn’t file anything, obviously, there’s nowhere to file it, but I did write the contradiction down in the little notes app I keep for exactly this, and then I did what I always do now, which is go looking for the publisher’s official errata before I trust my own read of the rules. This isn’t a new habit. It’s just one I’ve started noticing I have, the same way you notice you’ve been clearing your throat a certain way for years once someone points it out.

The thing is, when I play my games, I’m doing the exact same job I do at work, just with lower stakes and better company. At work a contradiction in a spec means two engineers built two different things that don’t talk to each other, and somebody’s going to find out the hard way, usually a customer, usually at the worst time. In a rulebook it just means two people at my table are about to have a mild argument about whether that attack should’ve worked. Same shape of problem. Wildly different consequences. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this makes me a slightly exhausting person to learn a new game with, since I’m the one who stops mid-explanation to say wait, that can’t be right, go back.

I brought this up to Priya once, half joking, that I basically do my job for free every weeknight, and she pointed out that I’ve never once complained about the free part. She’s not wrong. There’s something satisfying about finding the seam in a system regardless of whether anyone’s paying me to find it, whether it’s a logistics platform that needs to route a truck correctly or a rulebook that needs its combat sequence to actually make sense on both pages it appears on.

The Forbidden Stars rulebook, for what it’s worth, held up fine under this treatment, which is more than I can say for a couple others I won’t name here since I’m still hoping they fix them in a reprint. Five hours into that first play was long enough for me to find every seam there was to find, which is its own kind of silver lining to a rough first session.