Proofreading A Nameless Game

I actually liked "Proofreading: A Nameless Game" as a title. Make finding the errors part of the game. :)

Going to just spew out notes as I come across them. Hopefully some of this is helpful.

You are a bit repetitive with word use throughout. For example, on page two, you start with:

"Each player begins the game with a Champion card and that card cannot be removed from play in any way. Each Champion card consists of a name, card type and supertype, base power, Valor boost, Valor cost, starting life modifier, and one or more abilities. All Champions are referred to as “it” when being referenced on a card."

I think this would be smoother as:

"Each player begins the game with a Champion card that cannot be removed from play. All Champions are referred to as “it” when being referenced be another card and consist of the following attributes: name, card type and supertype, base power, Valor boost, Valor cost, starting life modifier, and one or more abilities."

You can see this again with footnote 2 on the same page:

"Champions come with one or more abilities. Abilities can be beneficial or detrimental,and some abilities happen automatically while others allow you to choose when they happen."

Would work better as:

"Champions come with one or more abilities, which can be beneficial or detrimental. Some of these abilities happen automatically while others allow you to choose when they activate."

Basically, unless you can't help it, you never want to use the same descriptive or supporting word in short succession. In the first example, I removed two "card"s, one "Champion" and one "Each" in addition to a few superfluous prepositions. In the second example, I removed one "abilities" and one "happen" while still keeping the actual information in tact.

This is an old writer's tricks, but it might help you catch some of these repetitions: read everything you type out loud to yourself as soon as you think it might be "done". This will help catch grammatical and structural errors. It will also help you discover flow problems like overuse of a single word.

This is actually a huge problem of mine. When a word or phrase "fits" what I'm writing, I will repeat it over and over, making it very difficult to stay engaged. You and I seem to share this trait. :)

I know this can be hard with instructions (trust me), but bridging sentences and using pronouns or synonyms will improve the flow and likelihood that someone will stay engaged enough to get through the entire manual on one go.

Another issue is the wall of text feeling. You do a good job of keeping things bite size and flowing on most of the pages, but page 3 is very heavy. Some paragraph distinction would help here. Maybe break it up with subsections like, "Equipment: Armor" and "Equipment: Weapons" since they have slightly different rules (one of each armor type, but only one weapon, period). This distinction would also let you identify them items as a subtype, so you wouldn't have to rewrite them every time (and thus, help with flow even more).

All in all, I think it's a robust stab at a manual. Your game obviously has a lot of information to parse out, so refining it is going to take a fair amount of work, but you have a good start here.

Regarding the weapons, I'm not sure if it is required or not, but that little bit of clarification would break up the manual a bit and could help some people. I would strongly suggest finding a friend or family member who isn't a gamer (or is a casual gamer) to read that section.

My wife has a hard time with some gaming tropes that I consider second nature, so I let her read all my stuff. I'm not joking when I say she blows my mind at what stumps her. Some complex ideas she gets on the first go while things I take for granted perplex her. Getting a non gamer to read stuff might reveal a bunch of necessary clarification you assumed wasn't required.

As for being able to play it, if I had the cards in my hands and your rule book, I'm fairly certain I could play it and teach someone else. It gets a little thick at some points, but that's just because of how much you have to explain and teach the user. If you smooth it out and break it up, I think most people who wanted to take the time would be able to play with little difficulty.