This design journal is going to be a shorter journal than usual since most of the work we have been doing is on one area of game production and development: rulebook editing.

A mentioned in Design Journal 4, we wanted to make sure that the rules were clear and understandable and that takes a lot of work! Most of this has been work around simplifying the wording so that more people can easily understand what is going on and on the Negotiation rules themselves. These rules were particularly tricky to narrow down during the playtesting phase of Who Wears the Crown? and just as tricky.

As we have been working on all of this the biggest problem we had was that the rulebook was getting unruly in length. With this the obvious issues were that we were not going to be able to have the examples and ensure that our rules were going to be legible. So we took a step back and realized the answer was simple: make the pages of the rulebook bigger.

With this we have had to update the box art as well since the game box we plan on using will have to be bigger as well. We also added several diagrams and examples to the rules to make sure that players have a multiple ways to learn and understand how to play Who Wears the Crown? and worked on reviewing these new diagrams and examples to ensure they adequately helped.

Our next steps will be to finished the final edits based on feedback, do some final blind playtests and start making how to play videos so that people can learn with both the rulebook and a video example!

If you are interested in more updates on Who Wears the Crown?, feel free to follow us on Twitter and Instagram @BlueHeronGames and Facebook on our pages Blue Heron Entertainment and Who Wears the Crown?