Language Stylisation in the Instructions for Polish Board Games

Iwona Pałucka-Czerniak's study examines language stylisation in the instructions accompanying Polish board games, arguing that such stylisation, though not the norm, plays a meaningful role in building a game's distinctive world and in inviting players into a culturally grounded interactive experience. The analysis rests on 84 instruction booklets published between 2000 and 2019, and its scope is confined to Polish-language games published in Poland, a corpus supported by an extensive bibliography of roughly 100 titles.

The central finding is that stylisation appears in about 20 percent of the surveyed texts. Rather than being distributed evenly, it concentrates in the introductory framing segments, which over 85 percent of the booklets contain. These introductions are usually factual and impersonal, summarising the game's setting, but a minority adopt stylised forms such as fairy tales, chronicles, or news reports, as exemplified by the instructions for Stworze.

Examining the rulebooks in more detail, the study identifies a range of stylistic devices shaped largely by theme. Games with Slavic mythological settings draw on archaic vocabulary and gawęda-style narration, while the Achaja rulebook, based on Andrzej Ziemiański's novels, uses colloquial second-person address and inclusive "we." Magnum Sal and Na Grunwald incorporate old-Polish formulas and Latinate sentence structures, whereas the modern-technical register of Capital represents the opposite pole. Publicistic, official, and religious registers also appear.

On this basis, the author concludes that board game rulebooks function as a hybrid genre, blending instructional, narrative, and promotional discourse. Stylisation serves less as a uniform convention than as a flexible resource, most often motivated by the thematic identity of the game it accompanies.