Whenever I have trouble getting back into a game I like to make my own setup and rules summary to make it easier in the future. These are intended for myself only so they take shortcuts and make assumptions about how I think about the setup and play and even our typical player count (2). I will share an example in a comment.
Do you ever do something like this?
@donio I have done lesson plans like that for teaching a game (I used to have them saved in google drive so I could pull them up on my phone). I haven’t done it for setup though outside of one instance; for Ginkgopolis, I had a sticky note with with player count and resources in the game for each but I think I have a note in the print out of the english rules now for it.
Most of the time, I can open the box, and look at the components and that’s enough to jog my memory for setup.
I have not done any personalized rules, setup or play reminders. So far it has been enough just learning the game. We tend to play the same games a lot before committing to a new one and that usually helps to cement the details. Sometimes I need a tiny refresher which I usually go to the handbook fore.