CW: article contains swears
Each one of these items and tokens and sheets is important. Each one of these pieces have been carefully considered by brilliant designers. Their role is clear. If I looked right now, I’m sure every token is explained somewhere in a game manual that unfortunately reads like a VCR repair guide that’s been run through Google Translate eight times. ‘Remember to put the second deck over the initial deck so the last piece from the regular meeples pool does not cross into the irregular meeples pool before the dice rolls a zero’. That’s not an actual line in the manual; I’m too lazy to dig through a board game box that’s larger than the ones I use to move furniture. Someone will get mad at me about this and, honestly, they are right.
Fun fact: in the digital version of Gaia Project is a link in the alliance screen leading to a web page explaining all alliance rules in detail, as many players reported bugs with how the game handles alliances - but in reality it just implements the rules as written. They can get complicated and many players don’t realize they were playing wrong.
Yes! Digital version are always properly ruled.
But if many players understand the rule in a specific wrong way, it means the rules are badly written.