Part of my job, the part that never shows up on the title itself, is reading instructions somebody else wrote and figuring out exactly where a person who doesn’t already know the answer is going to get stuck. Most weeks that means our own product docs, but a few months back it meant a vendor’s install guide for a piece of hardware we integrate with, seven steps, and step four assumed you already knew a configuration value that step three never actually gave you. I flagged it in the ticket the way I’d flag anything, screenshot, exact wording, here’s where a first-time reader falls off the path. Nobody thanked me. That’s normal. The point isn’t gratitude, it’s that the next person who opens that guide doesn’t lose forty minutes to a gap I could see coming.

I bring this up because I did the exact same thing to a board game that same week, entirely unprompted, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence anymore. Rulebook open on the table, mid-explanation to Priya, and I hit a rules interaction the book just doesn’t address, whether a specific ability triggers before or after another one resolves. I ended up doing what I do at work: checking the publisher’s FAQ, finding three different forum threads with three different answers, and eventually just deciding the sane ruling myself and writing it on a sticky note I keep in the box now. That sticky note is basically a redline. It’s the same instinct, applied to something nobody’s paying me to fix.

What gets me is how much this has quietly become the actual lens I review games through. I don’t consciously sit down thinking about rulebook organization the way I might sit down thinking about whether a game is fun, but by the time I’m writing anything up, I’ve usually already noticed whether the index exists, whether the reference card omits the one interaction everyone forgets, whether the writer trusted symbols over paragraphs or the other way around. Ten years of doing this professionally will apparently do that to a person whether or not they wanted it done.

The uncomfortable part is admitting the habit doesn’t always help me. Priya’s pointed out, more than once, that I’ll stop a game cold to go hunting for the correct ruling on something that barely matters, when the table would rather I just make a call and keep moving. She’s not wrong. There’s a difference between catching a real ambiguity that’s going to bite someone later and stalling a Tuesday night game over an edge case that comes up once a session. I’m better at telling those apart at work, where the stakes are a support ticket instead of somebody’s patience running thin across the table from me. I’m working on it. Slowly, and mostly because she keeps bringing it up, which is fair.