Here’s the opinion I will happily lose friends over: a rulebook with no index and no reference sheet is a broken product, full stop, regardless of how good the game underneath it is. I don’t care how elegant the core loop is if I’m flipping through forty pages mid-game trying to remember whether a specific status effect happens before or after upkeep, because that’s not a design problem the game itself created, that’s a documentation problem somebody chose not to solve, and those are different failures that get blamed on the same object.

I read documentation for a living, technically, transit reports, engineering memos, environmental review appendices that run to hundreds of pages, and every single one of those documents that’s actually good has a table of contents I can trust and cross references that go somewhere real. Board game rulebooks routinely fail a standard that a city planning document clears without anyone thinking twice about it, and I don’t understand why the hobby has accepted this. A forty dollar game with beautiful components and zero page numbers referenced anywhere in its own rules text is, to me, the same category of failure as a bus schedule with no stop times on it, gorgeous bus, no way to actually use it.

The games that get this right stick with me disproportionately. A clean reference card, an actual index, a FAQ section organized by the situation you’re likely to be confused about rather than by chapter, these are such a low bar and so few games clear it that when one does I mentally round the whole product up half a star before I’ve even played it. I know that’s not entirely fair to the designer, who might have poured years into the actual system and gotten stuck with a publisher that skimped on editing. I don’t fully care. The player experience is the player experience, and mid game is the worst possible moment to discover the answer to your question exists somewhere in this book, good luck finding it.

I’ll admit the flip side, because I try not to be insufferable about this in exactly one direction: an index doesn’t fix a genuinely bad rules explanation underneath it, and I’ve read plenty of beautifully indexed rulebooks that were still confusingly written page to page. The index just means I can find the confusing paragraph fast instead of slow. That’s still worth something. Finding the wrong answer quickly is at least better than hunting for twenty minutes and finding it late, and on a Tuesday night with four people staring at a half finished turn, twenty minutes is the difference between a great session and one where everyone quietly starts checking their phone.

So that’s the hill. Index your rulebook. Page number your cross references. I will forgive almost anything else.