The Civilized Guide to Tabletop Gaming, page 4
It sounds so simple, but in fact it’s an extremely challenging thing to do.
As a player, you may be faced with having to do things like chew through twenty pages of rules, understand them, digest them, and regurgitate them in a way that is meaningful to a group of friends.
You may end up being completely confused before you get to popping out the cardboard components in the box. If you get through that, you may have to do a better job than the game’s instructions, teaching the game to others without overwhelming and discouraging them.
In my experience, teaching a new game to people who have never heard or seen it before is about as easy as trying to walk a tightrope while juggling flaming torches. If you don’t have the tools to make a game seem easy and fun, the chances are you won’t be playing it with your friends tonight. And that would suck royally.
I vividly recall a failed attempt to both simultaneously learn and teach a complicated game to a less-than-attentive audience. It was a late-night gaming session; a friend had just acquired a game he was excited to play but wasn’t particularly familiar with. It was still wrapped in cellophane. As we sat around a table popping out the hundreds of tiny cardboard tokens, setting up the dozens of components, and trying to make sense of the gaming aids with tired, bleary eyes, he was trying to decipher the rules compiled in a forty-page book. To the surprise of nobody, the game did not happen. (To be honest, there was a bit of a drunken mutiny against the game after one frustrated and inebriated friend decided that a game that took fifteen minutes to pop out all the components and get them set up was not the right game for that time of night or that level of intoxication. He was right.)
This chapter will show you how to learn games quickly so you can spool up and politely and successfully teach your friends how to play them. The next time you buy a new game, the thought of teaching it and playing it with friends for the first time should fill you with excitement, not dread.
Translate Rules to Games
Here’s the unfortunate truth: Many of the classic Eurogame instructions weren’t written in English. Many of them come from Germany, and when they were exported to this country, some of the rules weren’t perfectly translated. Furthermore, sometimes these games didn’t have great instructions to begin with. As well, in some games that are a little more aged, the rules sometimes aren’t very clear.
Often, game instructions are self-referential as though the game exists in a vacuum, but game designers themselves do not design games in a vacuum. I’ve known games to assume the players would know the game’s most basic mechanics, but never actually outlined those mechanics. In some sets of game instructions, there’s a cultural gap between the game’s designers and its American audience.
All of this means that you have to be able to serve as an intermediary between the rules as they’re written and your friends to whom you’re trying to explain them. Here are four rules to navigating those leaps in translation and culture:
Visit the publisher’s website. Sometimes there are support documents (like rules clarifications and FAQs for games). Look for those to get context.
Look for how-to-play instructional videos and gameplay videos online. When trying to get context, sometimes a video is far better at articulating a particular game mechanic than a rulebook is. I have a particular fondness for Watch It Played on YouTube—there’s something to be said about seeing how a game is played that crystallizes and clarifies understanding better than rereading a set of instructions.
Play the game wrong. Sometimes you just need to start rolling dice and try to play the game, however incorrectly, then reread the rules after to get an understanding of what you did wrong. You need the context of the game to actually understand what’s going on. If you’re a more experienced gamer, sometimes you’ll feel like something is being played wrong because it doesn’t feel intuitive. That’s a good hint to reread the rules about that particular mechanic. That intuition has helped me identify things I’m playing incorrectly or my own gaps in understanding the rules. Even if that gap isn’t covered, feeling you’re doing something wrong means you can articulate it when you go to other support sources (like BoardGameGeek’s forums or the publisher’s website).
Sometimes the rules just fail and you can’t figure out the right answer. In those cases, play the game in a way that feels the most fair and enjoyable: optimize for happiness. It’s more important to kludge a rule that feels right and apply it consistently.
Learning games isn’t so much a task as it is a process, and when you’re dealing with a translated game, sometimes that process has a few more steps. That’s fine—just keep reaching out and looking for the answers, and if all else fails, play it in a way that makes you happy.
Make Your Own Gaming Aids
Let’s be straight: Some games have complicated, finicky, or otherwise involved mechanics that are challenging to remember.
That doesn’t make them bad or unpleasant—some of my favorite games have really in-depth rules that even I still can’t remember off the top of my own head.
Games like that are fun, but sometimes having your own crib sheet or other gaming aids to help you remember what’s going on or what’s to be done next can substantially improve the flow of a game, letting you and your friends better enjoy it. That’s particularly true if there are newbies present who haven’t played the game or don’t have your experience with gaming. Game aids can help these people feel comfortable and confident.
Make Your Own versus Already Made
A lot of game manufacturers include reference cards in the game, especially if it’s complicated. I certainly wouldn’t discourage you from using them, but your own aids can speak specifically to things you have issues remembering. There’s no reason you can’t use both.
There’s no shame in having personal references for your game. So here are a few things I tend to find especially useful when I’ve got a complicated game and I want all of us at the table to know what we’re doing.
Turn-Sequence Reference
Outlining the various steps in a turn sequence helps keep things straight when you’re playing, so you don’t have to try to reverse-engineer a turn of a game because you did something wrong earlier in the turn.
Having this reference keeps you from skipping an important step as well, whether that’s a game turn sequence or for an individual player’s turn.
Keep it simple—write down the general actions or make a photocopy of the part of the rules that summarizes each turn and give a copy to all the players so everyone is always on the same page and can reference these rules without having to continually ask for the rulebook.
Tokens and Counters
Easy-to-make counters and tokens help for tracking health points, resources, or scoring.
There’s something about having a visual cue to mark things, like how much damage or wounds have been taken in a game, what effects might be on a particular character, or what the score is in a game.
Some games include meeples or other tracking items, but many don’t. If you’re finding you need to track certain things (like health points, scoring points, or special effects), there are a number of easy aids you can use.
Some of the easiest-to-access tokens for counting up or down are decorative beads and stones available at local dollar stores. They’re useful for marking what things have been moved or activated, how many points of damage something has taken, or even marking who went first in a particular turn.
I also like using dice to count up or down, particularly if the values get high. Any hobby store worth its salt will carry standard four-sided (d4), six-sided (d6), eight-sided (d8), ten-sided (d10), and twenty-sided (d20) dice at the very least, though if you ask around you might find yourself some fun polyhedral dice like the unusual d7s and d11s.
Last but not least, bottle caps and lids and pennies, paired with either a permanent marker or a dry-erase pen, make for great markers for noting various effects. If something is slow, blinded, poisoned, or knocked down and the game didn’t include tokens (which is common for many miniature games as well as role-playing games), it helps to have a bag full of bottle caps you can write the effect on and use as a reminder of the effect.
Reference Cards
A stack full of index cards is super helpful in a variety of games. If there’s a particular effect or damage table you need to refer to in a game, having it on an index card is very useful.
If you have a bunch of magic spells or items that have unique abilities but you need to continually reference the rulebook for them, having those effects and abilities on an index card to reference is helpful.
I always keep a stack of index cards and pencils nearby whenever gaming night shows up. When I find that I’m continually referencing something in the rulebook, or I think a particular section is useful, I’ll make myself a reference card for future use. Chances are if you need it to reference, someone else will too.
Be polite and share your cards with the group. Others may make reference cards that you find helpful. Sharing helps all of you enjoy the game more and be more attuned to its nuances.
Making gaming aids for yourself and your group is useful, particularly if you find yourself constantly referencing the main rules. Focus on things you’re finding hard to remember but are important, things that are unintuitive, or things that just help the game flow. The small effort you put in when making these aids will give you a return in time saved when you play the game.
Pick the Right Game for Your Group
In the previous chapter I mentioned that if you’re going to start teaching games to your group, you’re going to need to know what kinds of games they’ll want to play to begin with.
The first step to picking the right game is making sure that whatever game you pick, you can sell the idea to your group. Sometimes premise and theme can carry you a long way. It’s easier to articulate a context for the game if there’s a clear theme that helps you encapsulate the game.
You can get a very clear idea by summing up a game’s theme to yourself. Without knowing the mechanics, you should be able to know if you and your group would be more excited to play a game where you pretend to be midcentury European diplomats negotiating and battling to define the borders of a continent (Diplomacy), or if you’d rather play as a group of intergalactic cargo haulers who have to deal with space pirates and asteroids (Galaxy Trucker).
Neither of those descriptions describe these games from a mechanics standpoint, but the theme can capture imagination and interest in a way that mechanics may not. That doesn’t mean mechanics doesn’t have a hand in keeping interest, though. It’s the next thing you should weigh. Would the group rather play a game in which you manage resources for maximum productivity (Agricola), or one in which you compete head to head for territory on the earth and moon (Risk 2210 A.D. )? Or would the group prefer a game in which the players battle the game itself for victory (Pandemic)?
The nature of the gamers you’re dealing with will determine the kinds of games you’ll be playing. If you’re playing with a group of people who love the history of war but dislike confrontation in their games, a cooperative war game like The Grizzled would serve you well, as opposed to a historical tabletop war game.
So look at your gamers and figure out if they’re more likely to be Care Bears or vanquishers, storytellers or puzzle masters, comedians or trolls. If you can determine that, you’ll likely have more success picking the right game for your group.
Teach Your Game Well
You’ve read the rules, you’ve picked the game, now it’s time to teach it.
Take a breath. Start with explaining how players win. Brevity matters here. Focus on the one metric that determines victory. “We win if we complete the objective and all get out without having zombies eat our faces.” Or, “The winner is the person who scores the most at the end of the game.”
Break down a single game turn so all the players know how the turn sequence should go. While explaining the turn sequence, introduce some of the various actions a player can do and briefly resolve them.
Playing the Game
Here’s an example of what you might say: “The first player will take two actions. Let’s say they walk and then open this door. This is how we figure out how far she can walk—we look here on her card. After that, if we look at what kind of weapon she’s holding, we can see if she can use it to open doors. Turns out, axes are good at opening doors. Now, the second player can then take his two actions. Let’s say he walks into the room the first player opened the door to, and then he tries to blow that zombie’s head off with his gun. Sure, he has a frying pan in the other hand, but I endorse the shooting choice because frying pans don’t kill zombies; people with guns do.
“The gun has a 2 on its rate of fire stat, and 4+ as its hit stat, which you can see on the weapon card. So he’ll roll two dice and kill that zombie if one of them shows a 4 or higher. The third player can walk into the room and search for some food because that’s on the objective list. She’ll just draw from the item deck to search. If we’re lucky, it’s not cat food, but we’re not picky; it’s the apocalypse.
“After everyone has gone, we then see if more zombies spawn, which is inevitable because we have brains and they’re brainetarians. We’ll determine how many come up and where they’ll show up, and then that’s the turn.”
One more thing: Try to make your explanations fun and humorous. The point is to make the experience of gameplay fun. Even when you’re being talked at for five minutes straight, that part can still be fun if you, the teacher, inject a little bit of humor. Also, people tend to remember things better when they think they’re funny. You may not need to make jokes, but throw in some pop culture references, some terrible puns, or some sound effects and you’ll be surprised how well the players will respond. If you feel foolish, remember you’re playing with grown-up toys and it’s best not to take yourself seriously.
Play an Open Hand
It may also help to play an open hand showing all the components you’re referencing. Make the moves the players might make. Furthermore, be sure to go through the beginning and end phases of each turn, not just the player phases.
Let me be clear: When explaining the process of taking a turn, it shouldn’t take more than five minutes. Be very brief, gloss over the tiny details, and just explain the game in broad strokes. This is because at this point you’re still selling the idea of playing this game. If you lose players while explaining the game to them, they’ll never buy in.
After that, it’s time to play a coached version of the game. The big thing is to let players take their turns but give them insight at the start of their turn as to what actions they can take. Explain to them some basic strategies as they move through their turn.
Playing the Game
Here’s what coaching might sound like: “Before you go, let me remind you that you can do two of the following actions this turn in whatever order you choose: walk, run, shoot, and search and trade items from your backpack into your hand or with another player. Looking at the board, it might be useful to help your friends who might be opening up a big room full of zombies in the next turn. They may owe you money, but if they get killed by zombies, they’ll never pay up.”
Alternatively, instead of simply laying out options, play a turn. You make the moves for them as you go through the game turn, explaining the logic behind each turn. That might sound like this:
“So for this turn, if I was playing as Jane, I’d take the Flying Orc because they can go wherever they want and orcs are awesome. She’d start conquering everywhere. She’d put tokens on these territories because they’re better to defend, score 5 points, and finish the turn happy. Now it’s Kevin’s turn, who has a couple of good choices. He’ll take Diplomatic Dwarves, because they’re really defensive, and conquer in this region because it’s far away from everything else and will let him keep his territories longer. We’ll put the dwarf tokens here, score 3 points, and nominate Dawn with his diplomatic ability, meaning she can’t attack him this turn, which is useful since she’s next to go. Dawn will activate her Amazons and try to take over the leftover empty territories since they’re easy points. She’ll score 3, and that’s the turn.
“Now if nobody has questions, let’s reshuffle the deck and play through the game properly.”
The players haven’t yet played the game, but now they have a clearer picture of what’s happening, and you’re not throwing rules at them completely out of context.
One other hint: Look at the players while you explain stuff. Their faces will tell you if they’re getting what you’re saying or if you need to walk them through particular mechanics again. Gently quiz them. The phrases, “Does anyone have any questions?” or, “Now, what would you do next?” are good ones to use. Make sure the people you’re walking through the game are actually hearing and understanding you.
If you’re trying to show people to play the game, your objective isn’t to win the game. In your metagame, victory is determined by how well the players understand what’s happening in the game they’re playing. Victory for you doesn’t look like beating kittens who are playing a game but don’t really know what they’re doing. You’re looking to turn these people into lions, at which point you can crack their skulls unrepentantly.
