Your rules, laid out and ready for the printer.
Your rulebook, laid out and ready for the printer: a print PDF, a web PDF, and editable copies, built from your rules and your art, with our full Rulebook Review of the finished book included.
What you get
- A print PDF at full size with bleed, pictures at 300 dpi, and every font embedded, ready to send to your printer.
- A web PDF, trimmed and much smaller, for publishers, contests, and your website.
- Editable copies in PowerPoint and LibreOffice (free), one slide per page, with the fonts built in, so you can change any word yourself.
- Our full Rulebook Review of the finished book, included. Once the book is built, our rules review reads it the way a new player would. We fix what's ours to fix (wording, consistency, layout) and ask you the rules questions only you can answer. You get the review's scored workbook and its Word summary with the book.
- Editor's notes, as a Word document: every change we made to your words, old and new side by side, the examples we wrote for you to check, what the review found and what we did about it, and any rules questions still open, with what the book prints for each.
How it works
- Upload your rulebook in any state (a PDF, a Word file, or plain notes) and your art, and tell us the facts to print.
- We read everything and email you a short list of questions about your rules and choices, with our plan for the book and three looks for it, each shown on your cover and a spread of your rules. Answer what you can and pick the look you like.
- We lay out the book from your answers, run our full rules review on it, fix what's ours to fix, and email you a link to the files. Each step is generally done within a few hours, usually the same day you answer.
What we do and don't do
We lay out, design, and edit your rulebook for clarity and consistency, in your game's theme and with your art. We never write new rules, change your rules, design any part of the game, or create illustrations. When your rules are silent, contradictory, or unclear, we ask you, and if you'd rather not say, we print your own words and list the question in the notes.
Every book includes our full Rulebook Review. We fix what's ours to fix (wording, consistency, layout) and ask you the rules questions only you can answer. Revise your rules afterward, and a re-review of the new rulebook is discounted when you send back your scored workbook. Before you print, the Print-File Preflight checks your files against your manufacturer's rules.
What goes in, what comes out
Back to the Box is one of our own prototypes: a quick dexterity game about lost pieces climbing back to their boxes. The order was a four-page Word draft with plain headings and no pictures, a PDF of the card fronts, and one photo of the game set up on the table. This is the whole order, before and after.
A plain draft, cards and a photo
Four pages of rules as headings and bullet points, still marked "Prototype rules," with a player count and play time that didn't match the order form and a few words used two ways (piece or component, stack or pile). The art: the card fronts and a single photo of a game in progress.
The questions
Before building, we read every line and asked about what the draft left open: how many players, what you score when your piece settles higher than the level you announced, whether you may keep hold of a piece while it touches others, and which word to use for each thing. Rules questions first, then the format choices. Each one says exactly what the book prints if it's skipped.
The finished book
8 square pages in the game's own colors: contents, what's in the box, setup steps numbered on the table photo, the two choices of a turn side by side, worked examples beside the rules, a scoring example as a table, and a quick reference on the back cover. Our rules review read the finished book and we fixed what was ours to fix; the rest is in the Editor's notes.
