I wasn't exactly sure which forum to put this in, so moderators feel free to move as needed.
I have an opportunity to attend Essen this year so I have been reading everything I can on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere to try to figure out how I want to spend my budget. Last night I came across a game called Winds of Plunder, a pirate game by GMT. On their site there is a link to a pictorial reference sheet that really struck me.
First off, from what I've read this game is in a demo state. However just by looking at their reference sheet I have a good idea about how it will be played and what the relations between the various cards/resources will be. Basically the thing is a couple of columns with little pictures and one sentence descriptions. Some of the little pictures are math equations, +1 VP for something or such a quantity bigger than(>) another.
What really struck me is that it was a one page way of relating all the bits in pictures rather than words. I have had several times reading rules for a game where some commidity is described in several different places, one for gathering, one for using, one for scoring. In such a pictoral thing you can look across and see all the places where that little picture occurs.
You can't play the game totally from the reference, but it looks like it would be a good thing to see relationships between resources, actions, and VP's or whatever. You can see if one resource only has two steps to VP while others have two steps a skip and a stumble to the same number of VPs. The first will be more popular. I'm a real visual person and having pages of rules to read gets tiring.
For any from GMT games reading, I am really impressed with such a sheet even though I know little of the game itself. For the rest of us, does anyone use this sort of thing already? If so, does it help in figuring out the overall flow/structure of a resource management game?
Andy
I'm resurrecting an old thread with a new example. I still think the idea of doing pictoral iconigraphic games components/rules is excellent. Especially as I am into buying games in German while I am here, I like games that are easy to teach my english-only friends at home. I also like the idea of things that are potentially teachable in 'Point and Grunt'. PnG being the sort of universal language of pointing at things you want and using body language to communicate.
However, I was surfing BGG again (not a bad habit) and stumbled across this picture. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/36936. It is of Cards for a game called The Prince: Struggle of House Borgia. I like how everything with money is the little money bag with income and outflow being different colors. But what really caught my eye were the little pictures to show how to play the card (hold in hand, return to deck, discard, must be played immediately).
Except for the little special abilities, the icons seem very helpful to me. They would require little to no pasteups to play even if they were in German.
I guess the thing that interests me is that as much as we want the English speaking market to be bigger it just isn't at the moment. I think games that are easily translated without reprinting or little reprinting of the expensive components would lead more to the ability of getting published across languages.
Andy