I love board games with rulebooks that exude personality. I’ve been learning High Frontier 4 All and despite its complexity, it has a bunch of dry humor in it that I quite enjoy, like:
EXAMPLE: Your Rocket has two thrusters, one with fuel consumption of 2 and another with 8. You attempt to enter the Ceres half-burn, but have only 3 fuel steps remaining. If you activate the high efficiency thruster, you expend only 1 fuel step but the thrust would be less than the Ceres Size of 6. If you activate your low efficiency thruster, you have enough thrust, but not enough Fuel. Since either thruster choice would result in making a new crater on Ceres, you cannot land there.
And in Kanban: Driver’s Edition, your dominatrix boss Sandra chides you as you read the rules:
When I visit a department, I am going to audit the slacker or slackers who have trained the least in that department, i.e. whoever has made the least progress on that training track - especially if they haven’t even started. If they also have subpar performance, I will check to see how many Shifts they’ve banked in the Shift Bank. If I catch you slacking off like this, I will penalize you 1 pp for each Shift fewer than 5 you have banked. Maybe that will kick your lazy butt into action!
It’s rare that I get to see board game rulebooks with such playful, funny energy but those are the only two that I seem to remember right now.