Yesterday, I
got in the car and started listening to one of my favorite gaming podcasts, On Board Games. In this particular episode, the hosts,
Donald Dennis and Erik Dewey, were talking about teaching games with their
guest, Giles Pritchard. It was a pretty
amazing coincidence to me, since I had an interesting teaching challenge this weekend
at our gaming group. Back in April 2011,
I wrote about not being prepared to teach 7 Wonders, and I actually put it away rather than ruin the initial play
experience for my gaming group. I was
teaching a new game at our monthly meeting on Sunday and once again wasn’t
prepared, but in a way that caught me completely off guard. Playing the game is one thing; scoring is
another.
[As a complete aside, I really have to
endorse not only the On Board Games podcast,
but also Giles’ blog, Castle by Moonlight. These are great resources for
those interested in gaming at any level.]
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We started
off playing a couple of filler games until everyone arrived. Afterwards I announced that I was teaching China (a fantastic game I will review
soon). I have never played the game, but
I often end up teaching games that I have never played before. It’s unavoidable, since I don’t get to other
groups or conventions to play games with experienced players. The game play is straightforward in China, literally taking only a few
sentences to explain. Normally, explaining
the game play is the hard part; it can be very difficult to explain the various
phases and options the player has on their turn. Let’s use Monopoly as an example. If you are playing strictly according to the
rules, the player rolls the dice and moves their token. From that point, they either: a) pay the
owner of the property; b) buy the property; or c) do nothing. Option a) is dictated if the property is
owned. If the player chooses option c),
the property is put on auction, and there is a set of rules for that. Of course, all of this goes out the window if
the player lands on Chance, Free Parking or one of the other places on the board
that have their own set of rules, too.
The scoring
for Monopoly, however, is simple; there isn’t any scoring. The winning player is the last person
standing when everyone else has been eliminated. Many games, and nearly all of the games our
gaming group has played, have relatively straightforward scoring systems. A few others are an exception, like Carcassonne, having a relative scoring element as one part of the whole score. In Carcassonne, scoring farms is relative to how many completed cities
touch that farm. In China, nearly all of the scoring is relative. That’s the difficulty in explaining the
rules. That’s what I wasn’t prepared
for. How much you score in a given
province in China is relative to how
many pieces other players put in the province.
That tension between gaining points and possibly giving away points
forms the strategy.
I probably
should have seen this coming. I have
trouble teaching Carcassonne
precisely because of the farm scoring.
Instead, I fumbled around with an explanation of scoring on Sunday. Fortunately, the other players were willing to
play anyway, and after a first “learning game” we played a game with everyone
understanding all of the rules: both game play and scoring. It’s not that the scoring is hard to
understand; it’s just hard to put into words.
In teaching
the game I learned a lesson. In the
past, I would teach a game by first introducing the game’s theme or story,
giving the game objective in story terms, giving the game objective in terms of
the rules, and then explain what a player did on his or her turn. Along the way, I would explain the various
game components. Explaining the scoring
was simple enough that it just worked out in explaining everything else. In China,
that’s just not going to happen. Explaining
the scoring will need its own focus, and will probably need to include examples
as I teach. I will need to work a little
more on my teaching technique.
It's Your Move!
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- A Second Chance at a First Impression
- Cheat Sheets
- Teaching Chess to Kids – One Rule to Wring them All!
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