The Art of
teaching rules
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1 We start our journey with the invention of television, complete with 5 whole channels to choose from! All you sheeple have to do is choose what you want to watch and away you go!
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2 Next up is streaming on-demand television, where now you get to choose what to watch and when to watch it. Lucky day!
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3 Moving on down the entertainment timeline we find video games which give you the added choice of how long to play a game, along with, what to play and when to play it.
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4 Now arriving at our final stop is board games which face you with the decision of what/when/how long/and how to play the very game you have chosen to subject your friends to.
Now, sadly for all you folks on this tour there is no built-in tutorial video that will guide you on your journey towards the future of entertainment. There are no bumper rails to keep your game night from going straight into the gutters.
Just you, and the overwrought rule book the game ships with.
That statement sounds pretty stupid the first time you read it. So go ahead and read it again, I'll wait.
Oh, it still sounds dumb?
Well hold onto any loose belongings because we are about to take a quick tour to find out why board games are the future of entertainment (yes, really)
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Hello ladies and gentlemen!
If you may be so kind as to direct your attention to the timeline coming up just below us, we can get this tour of the future of entertainment underway!
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So does learning how to teach rules in a clear and concise manner still seem so dumb now?
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Oh, it's still dumb? Cool.
But just in case there are any other crazy people like me who want to get better at explaining things, I'll go over what a good rules explanation might look like
To help get consistent rules coverage for games I don't play very often, I've found that writing a quick start guide is a lifesaver. Rather than having to go back and reread the entire rule book,
I can jog my memory with the major points, listed below.
Setup - Explain how the board and player pieces are setup so you can have things ready before your victims, I mean guests, show up.
Intro - Describe what the theme of the game is along with general goals and the way the game will end
Gameplay - Start with how a turn in the game works, going into further detail of possible actions after the players have a sense of what order they will be doing things on their turn.
Endgame - Restate what will end the game to make sure no one is surprised when they need "just one more turn!"
In practice the end result should look a little something like the example below. Even for the more complicated games in my collection, I tend to keep the rules summary to around 1 page.
