Links: Gender in Game Rules, Gen Con in 2021, and No Forums for FFG

Many industries have long since moved on from the "he/him/his" pronoun structure in their manuals, so their prevalence in many board game rulebooks puzzled us. As a former technical and instructional manual writer for the defense and tech industry, Tanya in particular was flummoxed by this recurring debate. If she hadn't used gender-inclusive language in manuals about loading missile launchers or close quarter combat for the Canadian military, her manuals would have been kicked back to her for revision by the Canadian Department of Defense leadership. It was her job and that of her management to get it right. "Right" meant sharing all information in a gender-inclusive way.

The top-most ranking, a 4/4 finding, reflects a consistent, diligent effort to ensure gender inclusivity throughout the manual containing at least 4 of 4 aspects of inclusivity including playable and/or non-playable characters that are male-presenting/female-presenting, that those characters depicted in a relatively balanced way in the rulebook, that there is the use of singular they, or he or she, or s/he, and there is a consistent representation of gendered player examples and/or imagery in the rulebook that is relatively gender balanced.

Our goal for the new year is to hold Gen Con 2021 as planned, in person in Indianapolis from August 5-8. We're working towards that objective with health and safety as our top priority. A variety of factors need to come together for a physical convention to be feasible, and we're carefully monitoring local and national safety and travel guidelines, health data, resource availability, and the advice of our finest sages, scientists, and sorcerers.

Hello FFG forum users,

For years, we've featured forums on our website as a place for our gamers to gather and share their experiences—giving a place to discuss strategy, anticipate upcoming expansions, and share homebrew rules and variants. However, in almost every case, the communities centered around these games are more active elsewhere, whether that's on other websites, in social media groups, or with dedicated Discord servers.

We hope that you've enjoyed the use of the individual forums for our different product lines, but we have now made the decision to close down our website's forums at the end of the January.

All forums under community.fantasyflightgames.com will be shut down on February 1, 2021. If you have content on our forums that you would like to keep, you must save it elsewhere by January 31, 2021, or it will be lost forever.

Although we've loved having the forums on our website, we hope that you don't see this as the end of a community around a certain game. In every case, there are other players who love the same games that you do, gathering elsewhere online—this could even be the perfect chance to make some new friends.

We've can't wait to see you out there!