(01-06-2024, 12:33 PM)treadasaurusrex Wrote: Alas, so far I have found the 2nd edition of the Infantry Attacks rules to be a poorly-written, disorganized, unrealistic mess with very few examples of play.
But why is that? I've exchanged emails with Doc B several times and have found him to be a very intelligent fellow. There is no excuse for rules that are poorly written. PG is a well-established system, and IA is supposedly an offshoot of that. Rules writing for a system that is not all that complicated should not be hard. There will always be ambiguities, but this hobby has been around for, what, 60+ years? Writing a coherent set of rules should not be rocket science.
Many people in this hobby have technical and legal backgrounds. Many have military backgrounds and are therefore accustomed to expressing themselves clearly. A company that asks for volunteers to review a rules set will have no trouble finding them.
Several years ago I bought a solitaire game dealing with the US bombing campaign against Germany in WWII. There was a lot of eager anticipation from the community on BGG. Many of us asked to see an advance version of the rules. The guy who ran the company refused. He insisted that the rules would be released when the game was released. Well, when the game was released, the rules turned out to be a complete freaking disaster. Typos, paragraphs that simply did not make sense, etc. Some of us pointed out that this could have been avoided if only some outside eyes had been allowed to see the rules. I pointed out that I had more than 30 years (at that time) of editing and technical writing experience and would gladly have looked over the rules for free.
I'll never deal with that company again.
Some people here have described the PG system as "fiddly" and frustrating. That's a shame. It should not be that way! These games are darned expensive, and interpreting the rules should not feel like a job itself.
