Ever get through a game and realize your friend never told you a critical rule that helped them win in the end? This happens more often for one group I play with who rarely has the same set of people or games every time we meet. They hastily lay out the ground rules and as the game unfolds they give more insight. They claim it is for simplicity. That it would have taken too long to explain every facet of the game. This is what I call a “Beginner’s Ceiling” where people who are playing a game for the first time are at an inherent disadvantage. Explaining rules is a delicate balance between flooding new players with information or starving them out for details that slow the game for incessant explanations. The art of this skill is only truly appreciated when you are the friend performing this balancing act while explaining the game. The worst cases of game knowledge discrepancies look like a Mortal Combat match between a button masher and a combo breaker.
New players quickly lose interest and feel powerless to change who wins the game as they don’t have “the right strategy” or “experience with games” or “any idea what’s going on.” I’ve heard each of these responses even after I feel the rules have been clearly stated and the goals are laid bare. What ends up happening as the default response is to just play a game to see how all the mechanisms work together. This is fine for short card games that can be quickly ramped up again at the conclusion of the last hand. But larger more involved endeavors, such as Suburbia, will simply take multiple nights to explore. You’ll explain the rules, play a game, and realize a large population early hinders your potential growth or that lakes are not an effective tile to play every turn(wild stuff I know). The next time you sit down to play again you carry this knowledge with you as your lone souvenir from the previous night. Unfortunately one new player joins that night and is at a natural disadvantage. Thus I have found through numerous instances of “well let’s just play it through” that it is often more enjoyable to take the time to introduce similar designs to new players in order to lessen the learning curve. The easiest example of this is in the “King of” series. The wildly popular King of Tokyo serves as a wonderful exposure to the “me vs the world” mechanism:
While in Tokyo a single player’s attacks deal damage to all monsters outside Tokyo
But during each other player’s turn all monsters outside Tokyo deal damage to the player in Tokyo.
Expanding on this basic rule King of New York adds some extra meat in the form of expanded dice, more objectives to focus on, and more rules on character interaction. I own both in spite of the fact that I highly prefer King of New York. If I’m playing with new players I show them Tokyo. A few plays later (days, weeks, months down the line) I’ll bring out New York as a way to crank Tokyo to 11. I’ve tried going straight to New York with soul crushing results(people were lost in how all the little rules inter played with each other). This is the pain I hinted at earlier. It’s the dilemma all board game enthusiast have to confront at one time or another. Do you play a game that you will enjoy, or a game that the group will enjoy?
Other games avoid this problem by making the game modular enough to swap in new pieces while keeping the core intact. My favorite example of this is a simultaneous dice rolling co-op exploration game called Escape:The Curse Of The Temple. Each game takes only 10 minutes to play and can be explained in as little as 4 minutes with the included intro. So at worst you spend about 15 minutes explaining and playing an entire game. At which point the majority of people I have played with immediately want to go again with higher stakes. (Stakes, why did it have to be stakes?) So you as the “experienced player” get to add in new tiles to draw from and quests to complete all while the noobs get a quick crash course on stayin’ alive. This is something that really sets “party games” apart from the deep thinkers most commonly associated with the typical board gamer. These games encourage social interaction, communication, and a shared experience that is much more immediately accessible. Ultimately this all comes back to the type of people, places, and participation your particular pack of pedestrians predicates.
TL;DR Think before you sink... a lot of time and money into a game that your friends won’t enjoy playing after you invariably master every element of it.
Comments