There’s a lesson every cook learns eventually, usually the hard way, about restraint on a plate. Early on you want to put everything you know how to do onto one dish, a sauce and a foam and three garnishes and a sprig of something, because you’re proud of all of it and you want the diner to see all of it too. Then someone who actually knows what they’re doing tastes it and asks, not unkindly, what the dish is actually about, and you realize you’ve buried the answer under everything else you were excited to show off.
I’ve started noticing the exact same failure in board game rulebooks, and once I noticed it I couldn’t stop. A rulebook that opens by explaining six interlocking systems before you’ve grasped the first one is doing the same thing as an overcrowded plate, showing off instead of communicating, and it costs the same thing it costs a dish, the diner or the player loses the thread of what actually matters before they’ve even started. The best rulebooks I own, and I think about this more than is probably normal for someone whose job is food, teach you one system, let you sit with it, then layer the next one in once the first has actually landed.
I brought this up to a chef friend once, half joking, that I was analyzing tabletop instructions the way I’d analyze a tasting menu, and she looked at me like I’d finally revealed how deep the deformation professionnelle actually goes. Maybe it has. But I think the underlying principle is genuinely the same regardless of the medium, that clarity is a form of hospitality. A rulebook that respects a new player’s attention is doing the same job as a plate that respects a diner’s palate, giving them one clear thing to understand before asking them to hold a second thing in their head at the same time.
I’ve started teaching games at my own table with that principle more deliberately since I noticed the pattern, one system, a round to let it settle, then the next layer. It’s made me a measurably better teacher, not because I got smarter about rules exactly, but because I finally had language for an instinct I’d already been using in the kitchen for years without ever pointing it anywhere else.