>A lot of board instructions also suffer from poor translations.
People who haven't tried board game design before underestimate how difficult it is to write the rules they think they're writing - very slight wording differences have MAJOR gameplay implications and will decide games.
Here's just one example of two widely different table interactions which result based on the example you've provided.
>Scenario: Immediacy Matters
>Context: I have just become one point away from victory. I have a card that I can flip over on any player's turn to score 1 point, but my friend is wrapping up their turn, and I'm next. My friend says: "Okay I'm done with my turn", and I now remember I have my hidden flippable one point card, because he said the word "turn".
There are two VERY DIFFERENT endings to this scenario depending on which of the two above rules you've written down.
In the verbiage,
>"The player starts their turn by drawing a card.",
If the game doesn't have any other explicit rules about how a player ENDS their turn, there's an ambiguity in the word "by" - it's not clear whether the action of drawing STARTS my turn, or describes WHAT happens DURING my turn (which ALSO ambiguously may or may not take precedence over my ability to flip that card before I draw a card).
This difference seems small, but it will decide the game, because if the act of drawing STARTS the turn, then by not drawing, my opponent's turn is still going - so I win the game by flipping on their not-finished-until-I-draw turn.
This will become a heated table argument if players are invested in winning, because it becomes a question of designer intent, which will probably dissatisfy everyone because suddenly the game's turned into "guess what the designer meant" and "let's debate the definition of words the author didn't even know were important."
In the former verbiage,
>"When it is the players turn, the player must immediately draw a card "
There's still ambiguity (When did my opponents turn end?), but less:
If everyone agrees my opponent's turn ended when he said it did, and it's my turn, because the rules say IMMEDIATELY draw, IMMEDIATELY implies it's pretty explicitly disallowed for me to do something else before fulfilling the thing I need to immediately do, like flip a card on the table. If the card I draw when doing this subtracts points when drawn, I will not win the game when I flip my card.
Disgustingly verbose rules like the above are the scar tissue from play sessions where these heated arguments took place and the developer decided that being overly wordy is worth avoiding race conditions and being unambiguous.
Just distinguish between the quantity of resumes you receive (a lot) and the quality of those candidates (mostly low/okay).
You still have a hiring shortage if the ratio of sufficiently qualified candidates in the hiring pool, times the size of that pool, is fewer than the number of people you want to hire.
The inability to get an equal trade shouldn’t stop you from trading anyways, as it misses that there is huge relative advantage of having a monopoly, even if it means you have to give someone else a “better” monopoly.
This is because if two players complete two monopolies first, they are basically guaranteed to be among the final two at a 4+ person table, as their early monopolies will quickly drain the other two or more players who refuse to make these trades and are therefore wasting time walking around, during which they’ll grow weaker and weaker due to your monopolies.
Knowing this, it almost doesn’t matter if the trade is equal, so long as you’re trading for a post-jail monopoly (pre-jail tends to be low value), because the winner, once you and your opponent have your improvements, will be decided by chance, as one of the two monopolists will bankrupt one of the other, more behind players first, and then take all their money and property, almost certainly netting themselves several more monopolies and funds for improvements.
You don’t need evolution to make your aliens, cultural separation would immediately begin and do it for you.
To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world.
Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture.
Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not.
It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home.
Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth.
To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare.
So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones.
Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.
People who haven't tried board game design before underestimate how difficult it is to write the rules they think they're writing - very slight wording differences have MAJOR gameplay implications and will decide games.
Here's just one example of two widely different table interactions which result based on the example you've provided.
>Scenario: Immediacy Matters
>Context: I have just become one point away from victory. I have a card that I can flip over on any player's turn to score 1 point, but my friend is wrapping up their turn, and I'm next. My friend says: "Okay I'm done with my turn", and I now remember I have my hidden flippable one point card, because he said the word "turn".
There are two VERY DIFFERENT endings to this scenario depending on which of the two above rules you've written down.
In the verbiage,
>"The player starts their turn by drawing a card.",
If the game doesn't have any other explicit rules about how a player ENDS their turn, there's an ambiguity in the word "by" - it's not clear whether the action of drawing STARTS my turn, or describes WHAT happens DURING my turn (which ALSO ambiguously may or may not take precedence over my ability to flip that card before I draw a card).
This difference seems small, but it will decide the game, because if the act of drawing STARTS the turn, then by not drawing, my opponent's turn is still going - so I win the game by flipping on their not-finished-until-I-draw turn.
This will become a heated table argument if players are invested in winning, because it becomes a question of designer intent, which will probably dissatisfy everyone because suddenly the game's turned into "guess what the designer meant" and "let's debate the definition of words the author didn't even know were important."
In the former verbiage,
>"When it is the players turn, the player must immediately draw a card "
There's still ambiguity (When did my opponents turn end?), but less:
If everyone agrees my opponent's turn ended when he said it did, and it's my turn, because the rules say IMMEDIATELY draw, IMMEDIATELY implies it's pretty explicitly disallowed for me to do something else before fulfilling the thing I need to immediately do, like flip a card on the table. If the card I draw when doing this subtracts points when drawn, I will not win the game when I flip my card.
Disgustingly verbose rules like the above are the scar tissue from play sessions where these heated arguments took place and the developer decided that being overly wordy is worth avoiding race conditions and being unambiguous.