The card game Magic the Gathering can be incredibly difficult for even the most seasoned players. Disagreements about rules and rule contradictions between cards – almost always stemming from imprecise wording – have been the cause of many fights among friends. This small sample shows a normal MtG card on the left, and my Instructional Design-based revision on the right. Instructional Design highlights include:
- The initial “when” condition is bolded for emphasis
- Subsequent variable conditions (“if you,” “you may,” etc.) are italicized for easy identification
- The object that modifies the card, Voyage Counters, is uniformly blue, which helps with:
- reducing verbosity by writing “add one” rather than “add a Voyage Counter”
- visually identifying “one” as being in reference to the Voyage Counter
- Action effects of the object (adding counters and drawing cards) are visually tied together in red
- Word count decreased by 22%
