The Little Teach That Could

October 7, 2020 | ≈ 921 words | Teaching

That last rant was a little much. I've never read Chicken Soup for the Soul but I'd imagine that last post was not like that book.

teach

Thoughts on Teaching Games Part 3:

The Game

Ok so basically the way I like teaching games looks almost like an outline for an essay or a book report.

• “Ok so basically” (very important)
• How the winner is determined and when the winner is determined
  • an explanation of when the game ends
    • an explanation of a round
• What actions you take to become the winner
  • A breakdown
    • of every
      • action
        • and special cases
• an uneasy feeling that I missed something and ending with “ and that’s the whole game”

Something that I did not add to this outline is the phrase “and a segue directly into the next step”. People are more likely to pay attention to something that seems related to something they are thinking about about, and using a segue can help with that. It answers the question “why does this matter” in a very quick and trivial way.

An example of how this works for a “straightforward” euro game would be:

• To win you want to get the most victory points before the end of the game.
  • The game ends at the end of the round after someone triggers the end of the game by playing … victory … the … the way the rounds works is:
    • Each round will be played simultaneously………..
• ……Card….
  • ….produce
  • planet….
    • …
  • …
  • …
• “And that’s the whole game.”

Interesting. It seems like you got lost in that whole explanation. That’s because listening to someone talk about something you don’t care about is very boring. It constantly surprises me when I finish explaning a game and people understand how the game works, but at the same time I guess it makes sense that people who want to play a board game…want to play the board game.

Let’s get back to the rules explanation I just gave. Why did you suddenly become unable to absorb the rules? Well, it turns out in this imaginary world, this is your first board game and you have no idea what victory points are. Yes, the roadblock that kept you from internalizing the game, was in fact internalizing that you are playing the game for victory points and you thought that was stupid. Since the point of the game was something you didn’t understand or thought was so mundane, you did not follow the rest of the now very boring instructions for a very uninteresting game.

And the issue is any number of things can become this roadblock. So why do I keep teaching games like this? Idk, it works most of the time I guess and I forget that I have to define what I’m talking about for every single different game I teach. It could be anything from what drawing a card means, what a worker means, what “I cut, you choose” means. Plenty of things that are essentially mental shortcuts that you can use to teach a game, can become an enormous hurdle for a person running into it for the first time.

It took me multiple games and multiple years of playing games until I internalized that getting points is something I want to do, even though I still hate the thought of “how do I convert these camels and these dice into the most points”. I love that in a lot of reviews that NPI did, they had a running joke which was an actual mentality that “POINTS ARE PRIZES”. I didn’t get it for the longest time until suddently I did; points are boring until you teach people that they’re not boring. It’s not that I have to constantly tell myself that points are prizes, but it’s the fact that if you don’t tell someone that points are something other than the thing the winner has the most of then there’s nothing intrinsically exciting about points.

Another thing is that in the rulebook for Dominion it explains how to deckbuild and shuffle a discard into a new deck which is like what you do when someone has never heard the phrase “yeah this is a deckbuilding game” but now when I play a deck building game I can say “yeah this is a deckbuilding game BUT you draw 6 cards instead of 5 cards OOOOOooooOOooo”. Yes, I have lost people quickly running through how to deckbuild, and conversely I have been lost being told multiple times repeatedly that I was playing a deckbuilder and not understanding what that meant until someone explained what that phrase means. This very important yet small detail in a rules explanation can be very detrimental to someone explaining a game and can be literally any number of things that a person does not know the meaning of, like the word resources.

I think when I teach games I try to take as many shortcuts as possible, and I mean shortcuts as in mental shortcuts so people can understand a lot with as few words as possible, but the trade off is: I have to know my audience. Making sure that everybody understands the game is the objective as the teacher of the game, and the goal of the teacher is for everybody to enjoy the experience. The experience end is triggered when everyone is mentally taxed from playing games, and each game is played in a series of things called minutes…