Please see the original thread on BoardGameGeek 🤓
Efforts are ongoing to translate the rule book to languages other than English. Please reach out if you'd like to help with translating. Click in the table to download the most recent builds in the chosen language:
| Language | Progress | Version 1.2 🪨 (Stable) |
Latest Build ⚗️ (Experimental) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🌍 | ✍️ Text |
🏞️ Images |
🖥️ Digital |
🖨️ Printable |
🖥️ Digital |
🖨️ Printable |
🤑 Economy Printable |
| 🇬🇧 English | - | - | download | download | ️download | download | download |
| 🇵🇱 Polski | 100% | 100% | pobierz | pobierz | ️pobierz | pobierz | pobierz |
| 🇪🇸 Español | 100% | 0% | descargar | descargar | ️descargar | descargar | descargar |
| 🇫🇷 Français | 100% | 100% | télécharger | télécharger | ️télécharger | télécharger | télécharger |
| 🇷🇺 Русский | ~69% | 0% | — | — | ️скачать | скачать | скачать |
| 🇺🇦 Українська | 100% | 0% | завантажити | завантажити | ️завантажити | завантажити | завантажити |
| 🇩🇪 Deutsch | ~15% | 0% | — | — | ️speichern | speichern | speichern |
| 🇨🇿 Čeština | 100% | 0% | — | — | stáhnout | stáhnout | stáhnout |
| 🇮🇱 עברית | 10% | 0% | — | — | הורדה | הורדה | הורדה |
🪨 Stable release is the latest one officially released.
It should be free of any major issues.
⚗️ Experimental builds are made from the main branch every time a new change is introduced.
You can expect things to break, like having incorrect layout or not all the text translated.
🖥️ The digital build is intended to be read on electronic devices.
It has convenient hyperlinks that navigate you around the text.
🖨️ The printable build introduces the following changes:
all of which to be print friendly.
Best served for those who would like to have it on paper 🤞
🤑 The economy printable build has no art backgrounds. Other than that, it's the same as the regular printable build.
This is for people who want to save their toners or don't have printers that can print edge to edge where the white borders around the art backgrounds don't look that good.
This repository used to host Comprehensive Components List listing all the cards, minis, tokens, etc. for every box, but after a while ⚠️ ️️Archon released their own version of it, and you should use it instead. Find it on 👉 their website 👈 called "Content Guide".
This project aims to rewrite the original rule book, in which the amount of vague language was just too vast to ignore.
This repository hosts a document that aims to explain the rules clearly and concisely, and should eventually have an answer for any basic rules query you might have.
The content in the official English rule book is, simply put, insufficient as a teaching tool for the game or as a general rules reference. If you read the thread linked above you should understand how frustrating this has been for me.
This is a communal effort. This repository serves both as a means for me to preserve my work, but also for others to contribute to it as writers, proofreaders, or layout designers.
Please discuss any and all factual errors, bad language or other errors you've found. You can do this by opening issues, pull requests with suggestions or writing in the BGG thread.
All new version of the rule book and their change logs will be published here and in the BGG thread.
To work on the document on your machine, you need the following:
Add Inkscape to the System Path option)assets directoryTo build the document in English, either run this in the command line:
latexmk -pdf -silent -shell-escape "main_en"or use the script:
tools/build.sh enor press the Build & View ▶️ (F5) button in TeXstudio on the main_en.tex file.
To build the document in any language (currently, pl, es, fr, ru, ua, de and cs are supported), make sure you have po4a (version 0.70 or higher) and use the script:
tools/build.sh <LANGUAGE>or press the Build & View ▶️ (F5) button in TeXstudio while having any main_<LANGUAGE>.tex file open, after running po4a (see Translations below for details).
To build the printable version in a given language, make sure you've built a regular one first at least once. Then, use the script:
tools/make_printable.sh <LANGUAGE>To make a printable version without any background images, add --no-bg flag
tools/make_printable.sh <LANGUAGE> --no-bgMake sure you have po4a installed (MacOS instructions).
To translate a particular section:
Go to translations/<section_name> and open <lang>.po file, e.g., translations/introduction.tex/pl.po
Choose a fragment to translate. Those start with msgid. Write your new text in the line below starting with msgstr. Example:
msgid "\\addsection{Introduction}{\\spells/magic_arrow.png}"
msgstr "\\addsection{Wprowadzenie}{\\spells/magic_arrow.png}"This text (msgstr) will replace the original (msgid) in your translation.
Regenerate your localized section:
po4a --no-update po4a.cfgDisregard the errors about mismatched multicols, as this is an upstream parser issue.
Rebuild your PDF file (or press Build ▶️ in TeXStudio).
latexmk -pdf -silent -shell-escape "main_<lang>"Commit and repeat!
In case an already translated text is changed, po4a marks such a translation as fuzzy in the *.po files.
Those excerpts will be compiled just as they are in the original (English), until the translation is corrected, and the fuzzy mark is removed.
To facilitate finding them, use the script:
tools/find_fuzzy.sh <lang>It will show all the fuzzy translations in the *.po files for the specified language.
It is a good practice to share screenshots of your work in pull requests. You can the script to make PNG images of specified page(s):
tools/pdf2image.sh <LANGUAGE> <FIRST_PAGE> <LAST_PAGE>Example:
tools/pdf2image.sh en 5 7To process a single page, use:
tools/pdf2image.sh en 5If you'd like to show a single image of two instances of the same page side-by-side (before|after style), you can use the following script:
tools/compare_pages.sh -l <language> -r <range> [OPTIONS]The script takes local main_<language>.pdf that you built and which contains your changes and compares it with the latest build
of the same language in this repository (e.i. the baseline).
Imagine you want to compare pages 1, then range from 5 to 7, and page 30 in English version. Here's how to use it:
./tools/compare_pages.sh -l en -r 1,5-7,30It will produce the following files: en-01.png, en-05.png, en-06.png, en-07.png and en-30.png.
Open help for more examples and detailed description:
tools/compare_pages.sh -hThis script requires pdftoppm and imagemagick utilities.
To reduce output PDF file size significantly, you can use the script utilizing ghostscript utility:
tools/optimize.sh <LANGUAGE>It will output main_<LANGUAGE>_optimized.pdf file.
As of writing, for English it produces 23 MB main_en_optimized.pdf file without noticeable drop in quality compared to 78 MB main_en.pdf built by LaTeX.
TeXstudio has built-in spellchecking, but the first steps have been made towards automated spellchecking with aspell. For local development, after installing the tool, you can run it from the command line for example with
aspell -d en_US -p=./.aspell.homm3.pws --mode=tex --dont-backup check main.texor when wanting to check all .tex files then with
find . -type f -name "*.tex" -exec aspell -d en_US -p=./.aspell.homm3.pws --mode=tex --dont-backup check {} \;Please note that currently the tool will flag many parameters in LaTeX commands. We are currently looking into how best to remediate this.
The personal dictionary .aspell.homm3.pwd currently contains only game-related words.
It does not contain names (e.g., "BoardGameGeek") or parameter values (e.g., "px", "svg") in order to minimize the chances of false-negatives in the main body of text.
All assets come from publicly available sources.
Some of the images in the rule book (all in the assets/examples directory as of writing) were generated by GIMP.
Their respective XCF files reside in assets/gimp-files directory.