I finally stopped buying rulebooks and just made my own cheat sheet

Been playing heavy euro games for about 4 years now. Used to sit with the manual in my lap for the whole first session, flipping pages every turn, slowing everyone down. Last month I started writing my own one page reference sheet before we play. Just the turn order, scoring, and the weird little symbols. Took an hour but now we finish a game of Terraforming Mars in 2.5 hours instead of 4. Anybody else do this or am I just weird?

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william8161mo ago

Something worth thinking about is how much this helps the other people at the table, not just you. When one person knows the game cold, everyone else just follows along and never really learns it, but a cheat sheet gets passed around and suddenly the whole table can spot a missed trigger or bad rules call (I have caught so many mistakes this way it is not even funny). It also changes who teaches, since any player can grab the sheet and run a game for a new group instead of waiting on the one rules guy. The downside is your sheet is only as good as your understanding, so a wrong call gets locked in and copied for months. Ours has a spot at the bottom for house rules we got wrong and had to fix later. Do you keep them in a notebook or just rewrite a fresh one each time?

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