The Rejection Letter I Almost Sent My Game Group

I write rejections for a living, more or less. Somebody files a claim saying they invented something, and my job is to go find the prior art that says otherwise, or to concede that no, actually, this specific combination hasn’t been done before and the claim stands. It’s slow reading under a deadline, sentence by sentence, looking for the gap between what’s asserted and what’s actually true. I did not expect that to bleed into board games. It did anyway.

Two Thursdays ago someone at the table proposed a house rule for a game we’ve been running as a campaign, a small tweak to how an ability interacts with a status effect, framed as “basically how it already works, just clearer.” I read the actual card text out loud. It was not basically how it already works. It was a new claim wearing the language of an existing one, and I said so, and I said it in exactly the tone I use when I’m about to tell an inventor their dependent claim doesn’t add anything novel over the independent one. Nobody at the table found that charming in the moment.

I really don’t know where to begin explaining why this keeps happening, except that once you’ve spent a few years reading claims for a living, you start doing it to everything. A rulebook is a set of claims about how a game works. A house rule is a new claim layered on top, and my whole professional instinct is to check it against what’s already on file before I’ll accept it. Dana has pointed out, more than once, that not every disagreement at a game table needs to be treated like an office action. Dana is not wrong. I have gotten slightly better about waiting until the end of the session to raise it instead of stopping the table cold mid-turn, which felt like a real concession at the time.

What I’ve come around to, slowly, is that the instinct is actually useful more often than it’s annoying, it’s the same instinct that makes me notice when a rulebook itself is badly organized, when a key interaction is buried three appendices deep instead of stated plainly where it matters. That’s not me being difficult. That’s the same close reading that keeps a bad patent from getting granted, aimed at something lower stakes. The group has mostly made peace with it. We still play the house-ruled version of that ability, for what it’s worth. I was overruled, four to one, and I logged my objection the way I’d log anything else, one line, plain, and let it go.