The Redline I Did on My Own Rulebook

Devon and I have had exactly one fight over a board game rule bad enough that neither of us would let it go, and the way I resolved it says more about my day job than I’d like to admit. We were three plays deep into a new game, arguing about whether a specific effect triggered before or after another one resolved, both of us convinced we were right, both of us reading the same paragraph and somehow getting two different documents out of it.

At work, when two people disagree about what a drawing actually says, you don’t argue in circles about it. You redline. You pull up the sheet, you mark the exact line that’s ambiguous, you note both readings side by side, and you don’t move forward until the language actually says one thing. So that’s what I did to the rulebook. I sat down that weekend with a highlighter and a legal pad and treated the disputed paragraph like a spec I was checking for a client, breaking down every clause, flagging the one sentence that could genuinely support either reading, and writing out both interpretations in plain language next to each other.

It felt a little ridiculous doing this over a board game. It also worked. Once the ambiguity was actually isolated instead of just argued about in the abstract, it turned out Devon and I agreed on ninety percent of the rule and were only actually fighting over one clause, the kind of thing that happens constantly with contract language too, two people who mostly agree getting stuck circling the ten percent that isn’t clear. We ended up going with my reading, mostly because I’d done the actual work of isolating the problem, though Devon still brings it up whenever he wants to imply I only won on a technicality, which, fair, I probably did.

The thing I keep thinking about since is how much of my actual job is just this, over and over, at a much higher stakes level. A contractor reads a detail one way, an inspector reads it another way, and someone has to sit down and actually resolve the ambiguity in writing before a wall goes up wrong. I didn’t expect that instinct to bleed into a Tuesday night argument about a card game, but here we are, and now Devon jokes that I need to get every new game notarized before we’re allowed to play it.

I’ve started doing a lighter version of this proactively now, actually, skimming a new rulebook with a pencil before the first play and just circling anything that looks like it could support two readings. Ruth thinks this is deeply unhinged behavior for a hobby that’s supposed to be relaxing. She’s probably right about that too. But I haven’t lost an argument at game night since, and I’ve stopped caring whether that’s a healthy thing to be proud of.