Rulebooks are linear presentations of systems. To write a rulebook you have to reduce a system to a linear stream, then to learn it you have to extrapolate systemic meaning from a linear presentation. There might be a better way.

People need context to learn. Have you ever sat through a lengthy rules explanation that ended with scoring? Scoring is the most important context for a lot of the information you are taking in, but it's missing as you learn it.

Setup is another thing that presupposes knowledge of components and (potentially) systems. Wouldn't it make sense to set the game up after you know how to play it? Imagine being introduced to components and concepts through examples instead of instruction.

For that matter, the rulebook could be better used as a teaching aid. Because setup is no longer assumed to be first, you can engineer and setup examples board states to explain concepts. This mirrors how many people teach and learn games already, so maybe we could lean into it.

The rulebook I'm imagining would be composed of discrete sections that could be approached in (nearly) any order. If each section had a number/letter assigned to it, then the end of each section could "suggest" other sections to jump to next.

It would be a sort of labyrinth, something that you can freely wander, but will eventually guide you to the knowledge at the center. To accomplish this, there are a few key features and affordances that would need to be implemented that go against common conventions in rulebooks

Each section would need to be self-contained, internally consistent, and make sense if it were the first section you read. To accomplish this, a "dummy" or "explanation" game state would be setup, then each section would interact with the example.

Afterwards, players would move into setup - then immediately play the game. I think the hardest part of writing like this would be unlearning the "round-systems block in a square-linear hole" mindset that governs much of modern rules writing. Thanks for coming to my TED Tweets.