"Are Wargames Rules too Cheap?" Topic

I have bought two sets of rules recently, one for £25.00 GBP the other for £35.00 GBP I'm used to paying the former price, but the latter seemed a bit steep. That was until I bought some figures to go with the games. I then realisd that one set had cost me the about the same as two packs of Foundry figures, the other the same as three packs. That's 16 and 24 figures respectively. This made me think about value for money and, frankly, i get much more value out of either set of rules than 24 unpainted figures. However, I think that £1.50 GBP for a 28mm figure is a fair price. That begs the question, are we undervaluing the rules we use?

You are using the term "begs the question" incorrectly.

But to be serious, I always answer questions like yours with a NO.
Don't give the rascals an excuse to raise their prices!

Generally no.

I would say "yes" but I'm biased. I know what goes into writing, designing, promoting and publishing rules (play testing included) and nobody really makes much of a living at it (whereas producing metal figures, yes they do).

But – in a world of the interweb and people giving away rules for free (often as "loss leader" to sell figures on the back of) – the market decides.

The long and the short of it is either make your own rules up (I do!) or pay enough to make the exercise of writing commercial rule sets a viable business or pay for them via their costs being factored into the over all costs of promoting a figure range.

Just my two 'pennorth worth (and that's too cheap!)

John T

I would prefer a higher price if I can get a printed copy of the book.
There are a number of new rules out there that I can only find in PDF form---I prefer to pay my premium and receive a "real" book

I also agree with John T. above---if I am purchasing new minis to go along with the new rules, please give me a steep discount based on the number of minis I purchase.

If the rules are stand alone then I think they are presently at a price that the market will just about tolerate. If they are but the first step in a codex type family, then I think they are already too dear.

I would like to go to a soft back, thinner £15.00 GBP – £18.00 GBP pound ruleset that was self contained and did not feel full of filler.

I think the Osprey rule format / costs are excellent.

As a writer/editor/publisher/figure manufacturer, I can safely answer "NO!"

Pricing rule books up would be a fine way of killing the hen that lays the golden eggs.

Indeed, when a rule set goes much above $40.00 USD, I automatically begin to sense that an egg has been laid, alright, and the hen is only after your gold!

ALL rules are loss leaders for any figure ranges the rules would need, and if the publisher can offer his own ranges, so much better for him, at least.

As a lifelong war gamer, I'd rather put my disposable income into figures, terrain, etc, than the rules I prefer for playing with them.

And I can't really imagine anyone out there feeling disappointed that he's not being charged more the latest rules purchase in the subject(s) of his preference.

Mind, in anyone REALLY feels that rules should be more expensive, they are entirely welcome to PayPal me as much as they wish separately after buying any title from

TVAG

Some rules are free, some rules are expensive.

The price point -as always- is set by the intent of the writer (make money and/or make the rules known), the subjective value set by the buyer, perceived quality, projected usefulness.

The prices are what they are – there is no inherent "fair" price point.

Some rotten rules are very expensive; some very good ones are cheap, even free, so the answer is generally "it depends."

That said, in comparison to what we are often prepared to pay for lead, we are often very cheap about what we're prepared to pay for a set of rules.

It depends on all kinds of things.

First off, the marketing strategy. Do the rules include army lists, or are you expected to buy those separately?

Are the rules stable, or will they likely change with wider play or new lists and require a new set within a year or two?

What's the format: digital, paperback, hardcover?

Does the designer have a track record?

Do people whose opinion you respect rate the rules?

Is there a likelihood you'll get to play them very often?

I think the figure:rules comparison is off. You can use figures with any game, but a bad set of rules is wasted money, time and effort.

My tuppence, anyway.

Cheers,
Aaron

I would prefer that commercial rule sets cost less than the current level. As I do not download free rule sets The cost is important.

As for "too cheap," later off line, I'll introduce the concept of supply and demand. A thing is worth what people will pay for it.

But I suspect that if anything there is a "rules bubble." Those Foundry figures will still be valued 20 or 30 years from now. And I can and do continue to play with 40 year old Scruby figures you'd be hard-pressed to sell.

But take a stack of $5 USD bills to a flea market, and you can buy as many five or ten year old expensive, glossy rulebooks as you please. Many of them were never used to fight a wargame. In fact, I suspect most wargame rules sell more copies than battles are fought playing those rules.

The classics are a different matter and probably a separate thread. But classics, by nature are a small minority of the product. The longevity of the VW Beatle doesn't say much about 1960's cars overall, and the continued utility of TSATF says very little about the proper price of WRG V.

How long does it take to write up a solid game engine, write army building rules, a scenario generator, campaign rules, test and reality check it all and make it readable?

Lets say 40 hours?

What's 40 hours of your time worth?

Anything we purchase is based on the simple idea of:

"I either cannot make this or I don't want to spend the time".
I can't build a laptop myself so I have to purchase one and I don't want to take the time to make a burrito myself, so I buy one at the mexican food cart.

Yep rules are too cheap. But I take the Osprey rules as my guide to pricing my rules.

So I go for softback and B/W pictures, keeps the print costs down.

$20 USD would be about my limit for nothing but a set of rules. If it included chits and counters and whatnot, I might go higher. Considering I can get very nice board games for $40 USD (such as the latest Axis & Allies), I would be hard-pressed to see the value proposition.

You're asking GAMERS if something is too cheap and needs to cost more? What are ya, crazy?!! 8)=

For me I have paid a lot for some sets and not so much for others and I feel I have spent the right amounts on all of them since that was what was on the price tag.

Now, if you want to ask "Do some rules designers DESERVE more dough?" then I'd say yes.

Only if you are the author.

What Nazrat said.

Now if you change "wargames rules" to "wargamers" then you would have a fair question!

Only when you wtite them.

I just recently released my first set of rules. I intentionally kept the cost down as much as possible. I wanted to get a product and my name on the market, but with no name recognition, I was afraid that a $60 USD set of rules from an unknown author might not work. I'm not sure if this is the right approach or not, but it is the path that I decided to go down.

Allen

Rascals is an interesting word used by winston. Are rules writers really rascals, attempting to rob us all?

Interesting to see Weasal's suggestion that a set of rules takes 40 hours to develop. If so, then fair enough, but is that likely?

No writer can expect to get paid for their time. If I spend a year of part-time labor creating a game or manuscript I know full well I'm never going to get back even minimum wage for every hour put into it.

I'd say that rules are tending to become too expensive for their own good, now that so many are loaded down with chrome and extraneous material and color pictures and fancy layouts. We've come to expect that, have we? Take some of that away and the production costs might ease up a bit.

That said, I'll *always* prefer a hard copy, and will pay for it, rather than depend on an electronic file that I have to keep track of on a computer and print (badly) at my own expense with whatever printer I might have working at the time, amateur print quality, bad or no binding, and pricey ink not being attractive options to me.

In answer to the OP – Ye Gods, No.

Regardless of other arguments, I think one thing that the ongoing trend towards more expensive, flashy rulebooks has done is cut down on "browsing" purchases, or purchases simply made out of curiosity. When I was in the USA and going to several big conventions every year, I never really appreciated how difficult buying blind is. If the rules cost $20 USD (or less, like the Ospreys), then I can make the purchase out of curiosity – $40 USD or $50 USD and I just shrug and think "too bad" and move on. The same goes for $20 USD+ pdf's.

So, one impact that more expensive rules would seem to have on the hobby would be a lessening of experimentation with different rules sets, which is of itself, from a purely hobby perspective, a drag on diversity. Could cheap pdf rules from WargamesVault etc. make up for it? Possibly, but I have yet to see it.

And what good does all this "flash" really do? I would bet that something like 90+ percent of rules sales are to people who are already veteran wargamers and know the period in question – do they need to be inspired by pretty pictures? Perhaps what publishes should do is offer cut rate, plain vanilla versions of the rules alongside a flashier, beefed up "intro/inspiration/collectors" set.

Cheers,

Christopher

A good set of rules is priceless

A bad set is not worth a penny

When rules push past $20 USD-30 I give a lot more thought into buying them. Cheaper rules I'll buy on a whim and not really worry about it.

ALL rules are loss leaders for any figure ranges the rules would need, and if the publisher can offer his own ranges, so much better for him, at least.

So how does that work for people like TFL? Richard isn't living the life of Riley. if we take this approach we end up with cheap quality rules, thrown together just to sell figures.

Interesting to see Weasal's suggestion that a set of rules takes 40 hours to develop. If so, then fair enough, but is that likely?

It'll depend by the game. Something like Warhammer with 10-15 army books probably took hundreds of man hours and I've downloaded stuff that probably took 15 minutes, but that's about the time I spend on a "big" game like No End in Sight or Clash on the Fringe.

That includes the game rules, testing it, making sure it all fits and works okay, having some solo stuff, a bit of fluff or background, a campaign system, a way to create scenarios.
edit: I should clarify, I am not including artwork in that.
The guy taking photos or the guy you pay to draw your art will add their own time to that, Im just speaking as a one man operation.

If I buy a game, its because I don't want to spend that time, just like the burrito example.
I can make a pretty decent burrito nad itd be cheaper if I got the components, but I don't want to go to the store, then bring all the parts home and have a bunch of stuff left over.

So instead of doing that, I take 6 minutes and swing through the drivethru :-)

How much is that worth to you? Well, that depends right?
Nobody will buy a burrito that's 30 dollars and nobody would dare buy a burrito that's 1 cent, so the price tends to be somewhere inbetween.

Some people will pay for a bigger burrito, some won't, some want a lot of options, some just want "number 1 as usual".

But they're all paying for TIME. :)

CATenwolde nails the second part of the equation:

There's kind of "three tiers" I find.

There's the "I'll check it out because what the heck?" which is probably 10 dollars and below.

At this tier, I expect a basic game engine with a few frills, not a ton of extra stuff OR an older game that's not seen a lot of recent support.

Up to 20 dollars, I expect something that's recent, supported, has an accessible support channel and a good degree of features (campaign rules, solo options, all that jazz)

Once we get into the 30+ range, nice pictures and something that looks like an RPG book (which face it almost always look nicer than ours).

50+ dollars is print only and a hard sell without trying the game first.
If I want to go out and buy brand new current edition D&D books, that's the sort of money I expect to pay.

What's the value of a rulebook you love, and play every chance you get?

What's the value of a rulebook that has some interesting bits, but not enough to bother with, and just sits on your shelf for 2d10 years?

If I knew everyone was the former, I'd say maybe. But that category is fraction of the rest. I've bought many a rulebook for inspiration, eye candy, and/or because it was reasonably priced- like buying a lottery scratch-off, I go in vaguely hoping I'll be able to get something more out of it, but have no reasonable expectation.

But this age of reasonably-priced, abundant rulesets has spoiled me.

Hmm. So if we measure a rules set by man hours--say 40, or even "hundreds"--how do we compute the value of novels? Pride & Prejudice and Gone with the Wind took YEARS to write, after all, and even adjusting for inflation, sold new in hard covers for less than Black Powder.

The time taken to write a set of rules is not my problem as a gamer. It is properly the concern of the rules writer: at what price, if any, can he sell enough copies to pay for his labor? (And keep in mind "highest unit price" is not the same as "maximum return.")

My question as a gamer is "will this set of rules add to the enjoyment of my gaming hours more than the ones I already own, or the other ones currently for sale? If so, by how much?" That sets, please note, a maximum price, and then only as soon as I find a way to express my enjoyment in monetary terms.

I could fill a flea market table with the rules I was fool enough to buy but not fool enough ever to play. In fact, I should. And if I could get HALF the purchase price back to spend on lead, paints, brushes and terrain, I'd be well ahead.

But I have two and four-page rules, typed our from books or given away to anyone who asked which are priceless. In the age of the Internet and digital photography, gentlemen, color pictures of wargames are dirt cheap. It's clear, simple learnable mechanics which seem to be in increasingly short supply.

Hmm. So if we measure a rules set by man hours--say 40, or even "hundreds"--how do we compute the value of novels? Pride & Prejudice and Gone with the Wind took YEARS to write, after all, and even adjusting for inflation, sold new in hard covers for less than Black Powder.

It isn't MY time, it's YOURS. You are paying for YOUR time.

If Gone with the wind was 1 page long and you were in the market for a story about "the old South", I imagine you'd be inclined to just make up your own story, rather than paying 10 dollars for it.

Since it's hundreds of pages, its big enough that most of us wouldn't want to write that ourselves because it's simply too much time that we can spend on something else.
So we pay for that work to have been done already.

What that exact amount is, well, that depends on how badly you as an individual want it and what features you want out of it.

Lets say we have two games. One is 10 dollars and has no campaign rules.
The other is 15 dollars but it does include them.

How long will it take you to create some campaign rules?
10 minutes? If so, maybe spending 5 dollars isn't worth it.
5 hours? If so, 5 dollars seems like an investment I'd make.

If we take away the time aspect, there is little reason to ever purchase anything in the hobby: Make your own paints, sculpt and cast your own figures, write your own rules and research your own history.

But I imagine we all find that we do not have the time or interest in doing all of those things, so we open up the Peter Pig website and the Wargame Vault pages to buy stuff instead :-)

That is why a discussion about whether games (or miniatures, or paints) are too expensive is difficult, because only you know what your time is worth.

Same reason everyone clamours for scenario books: They are not buying anything they couldn't have done themselves, they are buying the TIME it would take to do it.

I don't mind paying £25.00 GBP or £30.00 GBP for a good set of tules, BUT too often, you then have to spend that amount two or three times to get the "supplements" which are necessary to play games. Battlegroup is a good example, but FoG rules and Black Powder are also guilty. You finish up paying £100.00 GBP to £200.00 GBP to have the full set.

Two points. First, I find it ironic that wargamers will literally spend thousands of dollars on miniatures, paints, terrain, etc. but then complain about the cost of the price of rulebooks.

Second, the cost of creating PDF rules is not cheaper than creating rules in a printed format: it costs the same to write, layout, produce, and create because the process is the same. And really, though the costs of printed rules are higher due to the cost of actually printing the books (and storing the inventory), the actual costs of printing a book are negligible. If there is a large variance in the price of a PDF vs physical book, it is because the price of the PDF is under valued.

Part of the problem – the seemingly high prices of some wargame rules which, IMHO, does discourage some wargamers from trying/experimenting with new rules – is the modern tendency to produce books with unnecessarily high production values, historical background, superfluous colour pictures, painting/scenery construction tips &c.

Surely most of us would hope to be able to play a wargame, once we have mastered the rules, using only a short, simple QRS, leaving the book on the shelf?

HG Wells hit that target perfectly with Little Wars, back in 1913, but many of today's rules are often too complex to learn easily or to play without making frequent reference to charts &c. to enable us to have that pleasure. This is the other problem we face.

Weasel makes very valid points about paying for someone's time. That's why I intend to use a painting service for my next armies: the amount I earn per hour as a freelance will pay a professional painter to produce more painted figures – and to a higher standard! – than I could do in that time; moreover, I enjoy my work far more than I do painting (heresy, I know!), so it makes perfect sense for me.

However, the professional figure painter can only paint figures for one person at a time, whereas a rulebook, once written, designed, edited &c. can be printed in bulk, or on demand via Lulu or similar. A rulebook for a popular period, such as Napoleonics or WWII, by a respected writer, can reasonably be predicted to sell far more copies than one in an identical format on the Scanian War of 1675-9, so can be offered at a lower unit price. For me to 'value' a rulebook by simply estimating how many hours it would take me to research and write one copy for myself and multiply that by my hourly pay would be a rather false comparison.

Then there are people who are content to have their rules/scenarios published for a modest one-off fee in the wargame magazines, which are themselves cheap enough to buy speculatively. For example, I recently bought a copy of WI simply for the Napoleonic variant of Lion Rampant therein, whilst the fees I have received for articles have not equalled what I would have earned in the time spent in writing them, but I enjoyed doing so.

And there many wargamers who make their their rules freely available on their blogs – Bob Cordery on Wargaming Miscellany to name but one – which I have found to be eminently simple to learn, playable and realistic enough for my tastes. I agree wholeheartedly with robert piepenbrink on the merits of such rules.

Wargamers have a wide variety of rules from which to choose at a range of prices. So, my answer to the original question must be that some rules are WORTH more than what is charged for them; others are unnecessarily expensive.

For me to 'value' a rulebook by simply estimating how many hours it would take me to research and write one copy for myself and multiply that by my hourly pay would be a rather false comparison.

Sure, but that's not what I was saying either :-)

The price is what you're willing to pay to have that amount of time to do something else instead.

Evidence suggests "15 dollars" is often that amount for many people but a hundred dollars obviously isn't. (then again, with codex books, maybe it is?)

To the contrary, they're often way too expensive considering the amount of effort (or rather lack thereof) from the authors, judging from the typos, omissions, or just poorly explained concepts in so many i've bought.

If you are author of said wargames rules, you will typically never recoup all the effort you put into them.

I don't know what kind of rules anyone is writing that take a mere 40 hours to write. Maybe FREE ones?

Over a 10-year period, I've easily spent in excess of 750 hours designing and writing rules for a mass-battle game, designing several card decks, building troop point calculators, designing and writing campaign rules, play-testing all of the rules, going back and revising them some more, etc. I hope to publish/sell them one day, but I realize I'm really doing this for the love of wargaming. It certainly isn't going to pay my bills. You can say this about many folks who design or write for a living. There are the few who became hugely successful and make a decent living off their work, but the vast majority toil away in obscurity.

So considering all that, I think wargames rules are extremely affordable in the big picture.

I don't begrudge the money spent on rulebooks, lest there be misunderstanding. But high cost IS a deterrent to buying new books on whim or out of curiosity. I can't be the only one who is careful with spending money on extraneous rules sets when one could be buying toys. Pricier rules have got to be a harder sell, for good or ill.

That said, a good set of rules in an attractive package IS a treasured purchase.

40 hours to write a rules set? As someone who worked on staff at a game company as a designer, I'd say that's an impossibility, unless you don't bother to playtest and don't much care what you've dashed off.

Nope, and I would have expected better editing of some of the pricier ones…

I didn't include TABLE playtesting time in that, just mathematical testing of probabilities and formula, since a majority of testing comes from external groups in order to provide unbiased and honest feedback and in my personal case, those groups are scattered across the globe.

Maybe I am under-estimating the time, I don't know, I work on multiple projects at any given time and don't track each specific task.

All I was doing was trying to provide some sort of vague estimate so we could have a conversation about the topic.

So please provide the time it takes and we shall henceforth use those numbers instead.

Just realized that I had typed "testing" up in the original post, which made it confusing.
Sorry, you may point and laugh at my lack of caffeine.

I have two boardgames in print and a third boardgame has my campaign module in it. I have an Anzio 1944 boardgame as a DTP download and I have free rules on line, with two more free rules being added later this year.

Each design has taken hundreds of hours and would be considered a labour of love rather than anything that would or could generate income. So for this author, both sales and money generation are not motivators. The follow on support for answering questions etc is another factor in thinking of value.

My free rules are substantial pieces of work on my part, even if not valued by a user. I have no idea how many people have downloaded my free stuff, but recognition or 'thanks' is very rare (perhaps because it is not deserved, who knows), my point is that free is taken for granted, bought is at least financial recognition and 'real' value is in the eye of the beholder.

One thing that the nternet seems to promote is blasι comment when it comes to spending. A lot of what we do and write about is based upon spend, but the internet is a truly international audience with very many levels of personal financial situations represented in that audience. Sometimes the presentation of the shiney can be very remote or even insulting to anyone who struggles to have any disposable income. In this regard there is some arrogance in our hobby as indeed there is in all walks of life.

As to whether a system is too dear for a gamer, I think arthur1815 raises a good point re the amount of filler in the rules, that it is the single area that makes me consider value or at least brings it closely to my attention. If instead it wasn't there or the material was more useful / necessary to the rule application itself, then I would be better able to judge value. Likewise the need to buy special dice and cards tends to make me back away from 'exploring' new rules as does the codex mentality.

So whether rules are too expensive is a personal perspective and as somebody already said is subject to the same market forces as everything else. Even a roaring success of a publication is probably making fewer sales than we might imagine.

The capability of production, even at home is now so amazing that it is easy to fall into a trap of rule presentation being too much sizzle and not enough beef. A designer / play test group / publisher has to satisfy themselves that they have done their very best with a set before publishing. Writing rules is not too difficult, presenting them in a unified, tested, complete, errata free, understandable, loop-hole free way is the hard part and my exposure to most systems is that rule writers do pretty well at getting this right.

I can't speak for anyone else, but our design process is pretty consistent.

The time involved in getting the initial idea cannot be measured as things tend to pop up without warning. You scribble the ideas down and give them a go. Sometimes these "great ideas" simply don't carry water, so you abandon them. Other times you go forward.

The initial concept draft with the basic mechanisms is produced on a scrap of paper, usually just a singe sheet with lots of assumptions about how certain unspecified bits will be filled in later in the process. This is used for half a dozen games in the office to stress test the basic concept. This is a week's work for two people.

If that works, we then advance to writing up the first draft of the playtest rules where we fill in all the gaps we left open in the concept draft. we then spend three months testing this with our in-house playtest group whilst feeding back any suggestions into the rules and testing them back in the office.

After three months we go out to our external playtest groups with what is likely to be anything from v1.5 to v2 of the playtest rules. Again, we feed back any suggestions from that process. This takes about six to nine months work.

In tandem with the above process, we have an ongoing process of researching the period we are designing a game for. This involved books, museums, battlefield visits and, if possible, interviews with servicemen involved with the conflict (clearly this is limited to modern conflicts).

Once the playtest period is complete, we produce the first complete draft of the text. This goes though the initial stage of proof reading. We then produce the next complete draft with all diagrams in place and additional data such as Army Lists added. This again goes through another stage of proof reading. At this stage we bring on-board a professional technical writer who then takes the rules and attempts to ensure there are no gaps.

Next we add all illustrations which are generally there simply to avoid "white space" on pages. We then have the final stage of proof reading involving British, US and non-English first language proof readers to try to ensure all makes sense. This whole layout and proof reading process takes around six weeks with 100 hour weeks being normal for me during this period.

We then take the completed package to the printer who produces a printer's proof. This is again proof read before we authorise the printer to go ahead.

During this process, we are also involved in producing designs for any tokens, supervising any artwork with briefs to artists and meetings to manage their process. Discussions with suppliers for items such as card decks, tokens and gane aids. Advertising and marketing will also take up many many hours.

When the rules finally arrive it will take us several days with additional staff to pack and despatch all of the orders. After which we are then involved in post publication support work such as producing supplementary army lists and answering questions, running games at shows around the UK and into Europe with occasional long-haul trips to the USA.

In short, it would be fair to say that it takes two man-years of time to design, test and publish a set of rules.

Hope that helps.

Rich

An excellent – and thoroughly detailed – response/explanation from Lard Island: thank you.

On the subject of "rules shouldn't have lots of colour pictures and unnecessary flourishes that just bump up the price"* all I can say is that I thoroughly agree: no publication should attempt to present itself well, none should attempt to inspire and we should never promote something as attractive when the practicalities are all that actually matter: bangs for bucks and the bottom line.

Absolutely.

I'll just slip on my hair shirt (as putting on the heating would be an extravagance!) and get out my card board wargames figures I printed out myself (in black and white: colour cartridges are expensive – even to my employer!) and play a game on my folded newspaper scenery using my Roneo'd rules I bought in 1978 that put my teeth on edge every time I drag my fingernails across their curling pages that I paperclipped together….

Ok… a bit ranty I know, but…

Having spent the last three decades as a full time, professional graphic designer, I'm a bit, ummmm, biased: the media is the message and all that malarkey.

John Treadaway

* I'm paraphrasing and compiling several comments here…

John,
I do think there is an important distinction to be made between a book about wargaming, such as Henry Hyde's The Wargaming Compendium, and a rulebook for one particular wargame.

In the case of the former, colour illustrations to show the variety of wargames figures, styles of terrain &c. is highly desirable, if not essential, to communicate the nature of the hobby to those unfamiliar with it.

But a rulebook is a different matter: its purpose is to explain how to play a particular wargame, ideally in such a way that one can soon play without referring to the book, but only to a few charts or a QRS – I presume you don't expect a QRS to be decorated with 'eye candy'? Look at De Bellis Antiquitatis and its derivatives; have they needed 'padding' with colour pictures &c. to deliver an entertaining game and become extremely popular?

I suggest that most purchasers of rulebooks for historical wargames (obviously fantasy games set in imaginary worlds created by their author have to explain their settings) are already practising wargamers with an interest in that period or genre; they surely do not need information on the political/strategic background which they can easily obtain elsewhere, or repetition of advice on how to paint figures or construct terrain that they already know or possess in other books.

I have beside me Bill Hartson's Beginner's Guide to Chess (Brockhampton Press 1998) a 213 page, A5 format softback, which contains no photographs whatsoever, not even of a chess set deployed on a board for a game; just b/w diagrams showing the layout, the moves and sample strategies and book should have had colour photographs of different kinds of chess sets, from the plain, classic wooden pieces to exquisite, hand-painted limited edition speciality sets, such the Franklin Mint's Waterloo set. Perhaps a book about chess, its history and influence in the world, should – but this little book is intended simply to teach beginners how to play, and does just that.

Shorter wargame rulebooks with fewer colour pictures will be cheaper and so more accessible to youngsters, those who cannot justify spending large sums on their hobby and gamers who want to try something new. That's why I applaud the format of the Osprey wargame books. I recently bought Dragon Rampant to introduce fantasy games to my daughter; would I have bought a large format, extensively illustrated hardback for £25.00 GBP or more? No way!

Part of the problem is that tabletop wargaming has, in some people's minds, become inextricably linked with high quality modelling, so there is a great emphasis upon the visual appearance of games, and – IMHO – not enough on the simplicity and playability of the rules. Many modern wargame rulebooks have tried to cover historical background, modelling techniques and rules in one volume, and that has resulted in the glossy, expensive tomes that seem to have become the norm.

Well, my main rules are free. But that begs the question (that we always sidestep) … what are "rules"? QILS is two pages, front and back, of definition of the dynamics for the system. There are another couple pages of sample force designs and some scenarios, but those are just simple one-off type things.

There are hundreds and hundreds of hours coming up with material, testing it, having good and bad ideas, figuring out which is which, playtesting, revising, rinse, repeat.

I usually get about 3-4 downloads of the ruleset per week, presumably because they are free. Over the last couple days after running a couple games at a con, I got thirty.

What I charge for are scenarios and scenario sets. A couple hundred hours of design, math testing (as Weasel discusses), playing, revising, etc. per set. Then you have to put it down on paper in a readable format, which takes a round of writing, revising, others proofreading, fixing, pictures, diagrams, and finally … done! Or, at least, ready.

I charge a couple bucks each for these. About two-thirds of the people who have bought a scenario pack got the rules for free a couple days before. Three-quarters of the people who buy a scenario pack buy another, and half buy three or more. A couple dozen people have bought all the rulesets I have out.

So my pricing is distributed across a different part of the game experience in a different way than a standard "rulebook". I'm good with it.

It's Econ101, everything else is irrelevant. Is the price of an apple too cheap or too expensive. Neither, it's exactly what the marketplace says it should cost. Simple supply and demand.

I suggest that most purchasers of rulebooks for historical wargames (obviously fantasy games set in imaginary worlds created by their author have to explain their settings)

A very valid distinction I would accept Arthur.

The chess analogy is an interesting one as well. No I don't think fancy illustration is important in a game book about chess as it has – like poker or Monopoly – a visual appeal level not unajacent to zero*. But that's not how I see wargaming.

While playsheets shouldn't be overburdened with unnecessary space fillers, design and layout should be used to the maximum to make them easy to follow and if they, like the rules they facilitate, are (for want of a better set of terms) well laid out or even "pretty" players are more likely to handle them, read them, re-read them and enjoy the experience of ownership. That continued interaction with a pretty system that's also easy to use can – and often does – lead to a greater familiarity with a rule set and an increased ease of use.

That's why I work on a computer with a pretty and easy to use graphical user interface rather than something that I have to use via (say) DOS (even though the computer may cost more (certainly the graphics card will) because that renders it a bit more user friendly (and, I would argue, enjoyable).

I agree that there comes a point where unnecessary anything (detail, fluff, illustration, even "pithy" comments by the author) can get in the way.

I think it's about balance.

John T

*probably why I play none of those three examples more than twice a decade: great games but no shiny I'm afraid!

"if possible, interviews with servicemen involved with the conflict (clearly this is limited to modern conflicts)."

Don't overlook the value of seances, past-life channeling, or a Ouija board!

Heh.

Ok so being an author (one of two on our rules it took 2000hrs to get it polished), being professional engineers we would have had to charge stupid prices). We chose to sell for $16 USD as it was a labour of love. Is it too cheep? No if folk get lots of fun out of them that is enough. Why sell them, well then you know folk actually wanted them not just downloaded on a whim. Plus it does pay for the hobby which is a geeod feeling. I do hate over produced rule books that is to me total money wasted. Clear simple rules and line diagrams are sufficientPDF's keep production cots to a minimum. Many pictures in rule are not even actual wargames. There are no photos in our set. There are none in technical manuals which is what a wargame rule set is.