I'd much rather see board game instructions written as starting out with a VERY short summary of the game and its objectives (e.g. for Dominion: "in this game, you build a deck of cards that you use to purchase victory points. At the end of the game, the player with the most victory points wins."). Then you can follow that up with set up instructions, a simple explanation of a basic turn, followed by more detailed descriptions of gameplay and ending conditions, and finally close with detailed reference material.
For example "When it is the players turn, the player must immediately draw a card and place it into their hand."
compared to "The player starts their turn by drawing a card."
People who haven't tried board game design before underestimate how difficult it is to write the rules they think they're writing - very slight wording differences have MAJOR gameplay implications and will decide games.
Here's just one example of two widely different table interactions which result based on the example you've provided.
>Scenario: Immediacy Matters
>Context: I have just become one point away from victory. I have a card that I can flip over on any player's turn to score 1 point, but my friend is wrapping up their turn, and I'm next. My friend says: "Okay I'm done with my turn", and I now remember I have my hidden flippable one point card, because he said the word "turn".
There are two VERY DIFFERENT endings to this scenario depending on which of the two above rules you've written down.
In the verbiage,
>"The player starts their turn by drawing a card.",
If the game doesn't have any other explicit rules about how a player ENDS their turn, there's an ambiguity in the word "by" - it's not clear whether the action of drawing STARTS my turn, or describes WHAT happens DURING my turn (which ALSO ambiguously may or may not take precedence over my ability to flip that card before I draw a card).
This difference seems small, but it will decide the game, because if the act of drawing STARTS the turn, then by not drawing, my opponent's turn is still going - so I win the game by flipping on their not-finished-until-I-draw turn.
This will become a heated table argument if players are invested in winning, because it becomes a question of designer intent, which will probably dissatisfy everyone because suddenly the game's turned into "guess what the designer meant" and "let's debate the definition of words the author didn't even know were important."
In the former verbiage,
>"When it is the players turn, the player must immediately draw a card "
There's still ambiguity (When did my opponents turn end?), but less:
If everyone agrees my opponent's turn ended when he said it did, and it's my turn, because the rules say IMMEDIATELY draw, IMMEDIATELY implies it's pretty explicitly disallowed for me to do something else before fulfilling the thing I need to immediately do, like flip a card on the table. If the card I draw when doing this subtracts points when drawn, I will not win the game when I flip my card.
Disgustingly verbose rules like the above are the scar tissue from play sessions where these heated arguments took place and the developer decided that being overly wordy is worth avoiding race conditions and being unambiguous.
I wonder whether maybe game-makers are usually in this sort of environment, and so don't think as much about the experience of a group of four beginners sitting down to try out a game?
Only if you and all of your friends play from a very limited, range of games. In my experience, people like this exclusively play games that are currently or have been recently heavily marketed.
I'm friends with a lot of people who play games, I own a disturbing amount of games, and I sit at a table and play a game that no one at the table has played about weekly during normal times, maybe biweekly now that I'm stuck online. As a person who researches and finds a lot of games, it's very often me who's teaching the game that none of us have played.
In my experience, people who are really into games are constantly playing oddball, older, and obscure games, from the rules.
It takes a little more time to replay the start of the game, but if people are in the spirit of it, the exploration phase of it can move quickly. You don't have to try to make the right play. Just try something. If there's a thing in the rules that can happen, do it and see what happens, even if you think it's probably not the right way to do it.
Example: Eclipse, which we play whenever we find time and people to spend 7-9 hours for a single game. Just starting to play would not really work here, because you can not easily play multiple games to learn the rules incrementally.
That said, Eclipse is currently my favorite game as it's fairly complex, but the goals are laid out pretty simply: Collect victory points (VP), everything with a golden shield with a number gives you VP.
From there it's mostly about teaching the players about the actions they can perform each turn (of which there are six) and the associated costs. But in the first turns everybody will use a single action (explore) so the learning ramp starts of manageable. The move and the upgrade actions are not relevant before ships where build, complexity builds up over the game.
Also: Complexity arises from having a whole load of researchable technologies and discoveries on the board. But all of those are introduced slowly while the game progresses.
All of this falls out of the window when you play with the alien races which changes the rules for every player ... which is why play all humans whenever we have new players at the table.
Long text ... I just love that game ;-)
I think that it is much more efficient to simply drop the first part and go straight into the game. Whenever an action is required, simply tell the person their options and focus on reducing the information as much as possible.
Like, if you were teaching someone to play chess, you could prepare the board and play as white, while your friend plays black. Then move a pawn while explaining the way pawns move. Let your friend move a pawn. Continue until the capturing rules for pawns become relevant. Explain those. Then, one-by-one, introduce the other pieces and their movement over multiple turns, when they can actually move. At some point, a check will happen (or you can make it happen). Now you can go into the check rules, and how a game is won. There is no need to explain everything in the first game either, things like castling, pawn promotions or en passant can be postponed until they become relevant.
Also, there is no need to involve strategy. The focus should be on teaching to play, i.e. take valid game actions, not on how to play well. In addition to being unnecessary information, there is also a lot of fun in figuring things out by yourself.
Usually, for board games the designers thought about the best way to teach the rules and the manual is helpfully structured in that way. So it will first describe how to prepare the game, then the turn structure, then the possible actions, and so on. Often you can start a game parallel to reading the rules, which is handy when no one knows the game.
Simplifying the game, as in the linked article, is also quite useful. There are some good examples of explicitly changing the games to be simpler, but you can also do some more subtle manipulations. For example, in Go (the board game, not the programming language) beginners play with the full rules (which are already simple enough) but on a smaller board, which leads to shorter, less complex games. In Magic: The Gathering, you can teach someone by preconstructing the deck to contain only simple cards. (I have seen some board games incorporate this as well, but there it is usually framed in terms of 'extensions' to the rules.)
It's not unusual for only one person in a group to have taken the time to learn the rules, by reading the rulebook, or more often these days, by watching a video. Then, that person is informally responsible for communicating the rules to the other players, tutorial-style.
For games beyond a certain level of complexity, I have sometimes found this process to be absurd. For example, it might be obvious that the rules are not being followed correctly or consistently. Or more frequently, players are playing their first playthrough haphazardly, with no real understanding of the games mechanics. And no one wants to be a rules lawyer.
These things are normal and the games are meant to be fun, above all else, but at the same time, playing a game incorrectly or with partial knowledge is unfun to me, especially since it's not unusual to only play a game once these days.
I think the suggestion for gamemakers to include graduated tutorial materials, written or video, allowing players to trivially pick up the basics and begin playing immediately is very useful, and will encourage players to come back to the same games more than once.