Skuteczność komunikacyjna instrukcji gry planszowej

The board game instruction is a utility text which aims at helping its recipient. Therefore, the instruction should be written in an understandable, accessible and unambiguous way, so that the player can use the new information in practice. Recipients are people who want to buy a particular board game or already want to play it. It is the instruction that allows them to use the board game the right way. For this reason, it is important what the instruction looks like and how it has been written. The objective of the following article is to examine if this kind of text achieves its communicative goals. The text might be considered effective in the communication context if the recipient manages to follow the provided instruction. 24 different kinds of board game instructions were examined with the Jasnopis application, analysing text fogging and checking against the principles of the Wrocław model of plain language. Moreover, the research material has been tested in terms of the graphic design, linguistic correctness, as well as recipient’s perspective. The analysis showed that, even if the form aids communication, the text’s contents make the opposite. Layout and graphics help the recipients understand the rules. However, the sentence structure and used words add to the difficulty of the text.