I mark up every rulebook I own, pencil, small, in the margins, the same way I mark up a turbine service manual when a procedure’s written unclearly or skips a step somebody at the factory assumed was obvious. Cross-reference here, a note that says “see p.14 for the exception,” a little asterisk next to anything I know from experience gets misread at the table. It’s second nature to me at this point. I didn’t think about it as a habit worth mentioning until a guy at a game shop in Amarillo saw me doing it to a demo copy and looked at me like I’d defaced a library book.
Maybe I have, a little. I get why some people treat a rulebook like it should stay pristine, especially the nicer ones with actual production value to the printing. But a rulebook that isn’t marked up, to me, is a rulebook that hasn’t actually been used hard enough yet, the same way a service manual with no notes in the margins usually belongs to someone who hasn’t run into the real edge cases on the job.
The habit comes from the same place as the reference-sheet complaint I make in half my reviews, honestly. A well-written manual, for a turbine or a board game, should mostly not need my notes. When it does, that’s useful information about the manual, not just about me. I’ve started actually flagging in my reviews when a rulebook needed serious margin work to hold up past the first few sessions, because I think that’s a real quality signal a lot of reviews skip past in favor of talking about the box contents instead.
Priya thinks the marked-up rulebooks are proof I can’t leave anything alone, that I’ve got some compulsion toward correcting things that doesn’t turn off outside of work. She might be right. But I’d rather have a rulebook I can actually navigate under table pressure, mid-argument, three people staring at me waiting for a ruling, than a pristine one that looks nice on a shelf and fails me exactly when I need it not to.
The Gloomhaven rulebook has more pencil in it than white space at this point. I consider that a compliment to the game, not a complaint about it.