Want to hear this post in a podcast? Check out the Talking Tabletop Podcast Episode 4 to hear my voice read these words, amongst other great contributors!
I feel like this post may be preaching to the choir, as I suspect the intersection of person who reads a board game blog and person who takes an active role in teaching and introducing new games is close to a circle. Regardless, it’s something that’s been on my mind lately, and for those of you who listen to this and aren’t the primary game teacher, I hope you appreciate the person you have in your life for the role they fulfill.
Firstly, my background. I am the primary rules teacher for our game group, and our usual cadence is that we meet on Wednesdays at one of our houses (we rotate who hosts for the evening). Usually on Monday the host will drop a couple game suggestions, and everyone will give their opinion on what they’d like to play, in addition to confirming their attendance.
That’s a lot of rules…
I am usually the one who pulls up the rulebook and give it a read through. Then, on game day, I generally take the rulebook and give the abridged version to the group. If any questions come up, I usually know where to find them in that book, just due to the fact that I’ve read the book at least once, so I’ll read out the rule as written, and sometimes we’ll debate the meaning of the rule.
I don’t always learn well from JUST reading a rulebook, and in fact, I learn best when I have the game in front of me and I can move pieces as I talk through the rules, that’s how I best internalize rules, by doing. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at teaching my friends how to play, one of the tricks I’ve learned works well is to get everyone’s hands on pieces during the set-up. Get one person to shuffle cards, get the next person to sort components, get the third person to place tokens on the board, things like that.
That said, by the time game night rolls around, I’ve generally already spent 30 minutes to an hour researching the game, even if it is just reading a book and looking for FAQs and Errata’s. It’s a hidden time cost, one that doesn’t always get recognized. Depending on the complexity of the game and the quality of the rulebook (Hansa Teutonica, I’m looking at you), that can flex in either direction. Personally, I find it incredibly difficult when rulebooks have thematic names for all the different aspects that’s only mentioned once at the start of the book and never again. Like, the first time I read the rule “For 1 action, a player may displace another player’s trader from a house along a trading route (not from an office). To do so, he removes the other player’s trader and replaces it with his own trader or merchant from his personal supply; however, the displacing player must pay a penalty by moving an additional trader or merchant from his own personal supply back into his stock.” I had to stop for a second and just shake my head. It makes sense when you’re actually playing Hansa Teutonica, but out of context, just as words on a page, it’s hard to make sense of it.
In Hansa Teutonica, cubes are traders and discs are merchants.
Going a bit further, game teachers have an extra cognitive load to bear. In addition to playing their own game, developing their own strategy, they also end up being the arbiter of the rules, watching each other player’s turns to make sure no rules were missed. If rules questions come up, the teacher needs to stop thinking about their strategy and pivot to looking up the specific question in the rule book.
Now the ugly part. With new games comes rule mistakes, and sometimes, hurt feelings. I get an awful, sinking feeling in my gut when I teach a game one way, only to realize halfway through that we’ve made a critical error. Sometimes it comes up on a player’s turn and I get a “I didn’t know that was a rule! I wouldn’t have done this if I had known that!”. I get it, it sucks when the wind is taken out of your sail because of a mistake. Thankfully, no one in my group gets really heated, we all know it’s just a game. We’ll debate how best to rectify the situation, either play out the rest of the game with the rule as we’ve been playing it, or undo turns to make the aggrieved party whole
Leaning and teaching a new game is difficult. There’s a lot of nuance that you don’t always glean from just reading a rulebook, sentences that don’t make sense when taken out of context of the gameplay. I recently had someone tell me a story of a time they taught a rule wrong at a public meet-up, and one of the players threw a bit of a fit and just… left.
There’s a lot of stuff in the Voidfall box
The inspiration for this post mostly comes from my recent Voidfall experience, whereby the time we took the first turn, I had invested like, 6 to 8 hours in unboxing, organizing, re-boxing, learning, and setup. 6 hours of my time that I’m spending, so our group can have a better experience.
In the end, all I’m trying to say is, if you have a game teacher in your life. Say thanks! Acknowledge the effort they’re putting forth for the group, and if they make a mistake, be lenient.
And if you’re not willing to be lenient, then take on the task of teaching the games. Be the change you want to see in the world.
