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.
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.
I haven’t played the game in English and did just learn, that its ‘federations’ in English and not alliances. TIL. This has a slightly different meaning than my localized version.
I don’t think, that the rules are badly written in this case, when checking the rule book. You can check page 8 here, which I find quite clear: https://capstone-games.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Gaia-Project-Rules-CG.0609sm2.pdf
But then, since the game is really complex, there can be confusion about the federation rules, especially following all three and keeping in mind, that these rules are independent of each other - and forgetting to evaluate all three rules when adjusting your federation when you make a change to make it compliant. See this BGG post for an example: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2120375/official-federation-faq