Hello, Chaz Marler from Pair Of Dice Paradise here.

I recently played Star Trek Fleet Captains with an old friend. Okay, more accurately, I recently flipped clumsily through the Star Trek Fleet Captains rulebook as an old friend asked me questions while attempting to play.That’s why I am a big advocate of quick reference sheets. Printing off a few will not only make it easier to teach a game, but will also help prevent you from having to stop the action every five minutes to look up again how activating a saboteur Command Card ability during multi-ship combat system tests works because would it have killed you to have included an index in the back of the rulebook?!? ... I seem to be straying off topic. Ahem.

An excellent source of quick reference sheets is the website for The Esoteric Order Of Gamers (www.orderofgamers.com). As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the best-kept secrets on the internet. And if you’ve met the internet, then you know it’s not very good at keeping secrets.

The Esoteric Order Of Gamers website contains often updated, beautifully designed rules summaries for over 200 board games, from Android Netrunner to Zpocalypse.

But rule summary sheets aren’t the only thing that they produce. Their website also contains guides for creating foam core inserts to hold the components for a variety of games, such as Mansions of Madness, City of Remnants and Descent 2nd Edition. Plus, they list post frequent reviews and gaming session reports, as well as some videos and interviews. They actually produce quite a variety of board game related content. In fact, the extent of content present on their website was so extensive, I created a printable reference sheet to guide you through the content on their website. See what I did there? Printable reference sheet? Heh-heh? Ah, never mind.

If I had to offer some constructive criticism about The Esoteric Order Of Gamers printouts, it would be that, ironically, their beautiful colorful designs can be a problem. They’re beautiful when printed out in color, but not everyone has access to color printers, and when printed out in black and white, sometimes the colored backgrounds can make the text turn out muddy and difficult to read. Offering a version of the printouts that are optimized for black and white printers, with the background art removed, would be phenomenal. But that’s a minor complaint, and even bringing it up makes me feel like I’m saying, “hey, you know that awesome free thing you made was really helpful, but I wanted it to be even more awesome, thanks.”

With so many printable reference sheets and rules summaries available, one may even consider the rulebooks for dozens and dozens of games in their collection to be obsolete, and even go so far as to shred them all. One may then realize, immediately after doing so, that doing so was a colossal mistake because Star Trek Fleet Captains is not one of the games that the website has a printout for yet. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some shredded rulebook pages to tape back together before my game night begins.