But what gets to me isn’t when the rules aren’t clear, it’s when as a group you either need the rules to be perfectly clear or can’t come to a decision. Why, because it takes away from the fun of the game. I want to be able to sit down and play a game with some friends and have a good time. If we need to know every rule perfectly or cover every situation just write, it bogs down the game and takes away from the fun.

Here’s A Little Secret

I’ll let you in on something, no matter what you do, you probably won’t play the rules for a game with any complexity perfectly. Someone will forget to do something or do it in the wrong order. You’ll forget a step or pay to little or too much for a card. It’s bound to happen no matter what you do because, knowing a games rules perfectly isn’t easy to do, especially if you know a lot.

Let’s talk about Monopoly, these are often missed rules. Money on community chest, that’s not a thing. Don’t want to buy a property, it goes up for auction and gets sold then, even you can bid on it. Monopoly is not a complex game but it has rules that people forget or just don’t know. And that happens with almost every game. I’m fairly confident that I play all of Ohanami’s rules right, but that’s even simpler than Monopoly, beyond that, probably not many games.

But That’s Not A Problem Because Board Games Are Fun

I know this might be a surprise, but board games are supposed to be fun. I talk about this from time to time, but you play to win but winning is not the point of the game. The point of a gam, in my opinion, is to have fun. If I’m miserable the whole time, I won’t want to play again. So be fine with getting a rule wrong or if you can’t find an answer quickly making a decision quickly.

And that’s the big thing, you can maybe find out a rule by diving deep into a thirty page rule book. But that might take 30 minutes or time or more, and that isn’t fun. So what are strategies you can take to your game nights and your game table to keep on playing the games and stop reading rules?

Set A Time Limit

Set a time limit on how long players can look up rules. This can be for each rule look up or for the whole game. Don’t make it too short, thirty seconds is enough time to get a rule book out, probably not look at it. But don’t make it too long either, if it’s more than a couple of minutes, then it’s time to set down the rule book and go onto another method for deciding what the ruling should be.

Majority Rules

Next try and come to a consensus around the table. It can be done by majority or by getting everyone to agree, ideally. You’re all adults at the table so talk about it. Again, don’t take too long talking about it. This is not a chance for arguments and rebuttals. That’s probably already happened anyways. Just talk about it and decide a plan of action quickly, again to keep the fun going. If not decision is forth coming, you have three options that you can decide upon before the game.

Always The Worst Outcome

This rule comes from Kingdom Death Monster, and it’s not really a rule, it’s more something they say. In a game like Kingdom Death Monster, and a name like that, you can assume that bad stuff are going to happen. And lots of bad things are going to happen, so just assume that something bad is going to happen if you don’t know the answer. Does that monster hit you from all the way over there, can’t find that easily, the answer is then yes, it does. This works really well in games with a darker theme.

Always The Best Outcome

It might be also that you are playing a lighter cooperative game. You could be playing with kids, so pick the nicer outcome. If you don’t know what to do there is no harm is making it work out for you. The rules don’t say who gets points in case of a tie on something, you both get the points. Everyone feels better about it in the end, unless you’re playing with someone very cut throat.

Always The Most Interesting/Entertaining/Thematic Outcome

Finally, you can always just pick the most thematic option. I say interesting or entertaining as well. If the results would be hilarious if you pass or if it failed, do that. This comes up a lot in Dungeons and Dragons, don’t let the dice dictate you away from having a memorable time. And often games will help you with their theme. Especially story driven games, those give you the chance to ask the question what your character would do.

In The End Have Fun

There are more opportunities to ruin fun at a game table than you’d think. And if everyone is there with true intentions the goal is to have more fun. And if rules keep people from having fun, you and I need to adjust how we look at rules. Keep in mind that some people might try and use these things to their advantage. Trying to misinterpret the rules in a way to make them win. Don’t game with those people, they aren’t there to have fun.

How do you handle rules questions mid game at your table?

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First, teach games often. As long as you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and you’re trying to improve upon it, you will get better. The adage practice makes perfect is true, the more you teach games, the better you get at it. You’ll know which things to highlight and which things to skip and bring up in the game.

Second, don’t read from the rule book. If you need it to help you remember, that’s fine, but try to read as little word for word from the rule book. Rule books are not always well written and not always are they meant to teach rules directly from. Fantasy Flight does a good job with a rule book of what you need to know to start playing and then a rules reference that you can dig into for more information, but most rules have all that information in them.

Three, highlight only the important things. I’m going to, after this point, write out how I go try to go through teaching a board game, but this one is pretty easy. There are going to be things that are exceptions to the rule, and unless that exception is important to a strategy, you can gloss over it, for a first game, try and teach the big points and the objectives clearly, smaller details can be filled in as time goes on.

So, what does this look like in practice? When I teach games, I generally try and go about it this way.

1. Theme/story of the game
2. Win condition
3. How a Turn Works
4. Actions You can Do On A Turn
5. Exceptions/Special Rules
6. Any Rules that Depend on Set-up

1 – Why do I start off with theme?

“In Welcome To… you can build your perfect stepford neighborhood.”

That’s basically the pitch that I always use for Welcome To… It works well because it gives people an idea of the white picket fence neighborhood, and even if they don’t know precisely what The Stepford Wives was about, it gives them a vague idea. This line or quick paragraph is how you sell a game and the mood for the game.

2 – Next comes explaining how you win the game, whether it’s cooperative or not and whether I go into every detail or not at this point in time, I explain how you win the game. In Welcome To… I basically as saying that you are trying to build the best most marketable neighborhood to get points by building pools, parks, fencing off neighborhoods and more. Or in Pandemic, the goal is to clear all the diseases before you run out of player cards, disease cubes or have too many outbreaks.

The win condition is just important to talk about up front because it again helps inform the type of game that you’re getting into. If it’s a big point salad sort of game versus a combat focused game. I think that Scythe is a good example of why you do this, Scythe looks like it should be a big area control, dudes on a map, alternate timelines, but it’s a Euro game. So setting that up through talking about how you win is important for expectation setting.

3 – The turn, I’m talking about the big structure of it here. In Welcome To… that is basically that there are going to be three pairs of card options to choose from and you’ll do what the pair you chose to use tells you to do. In Pandemic it’s trickier, you have your turn, you have the drawing of player cards, the infection step and discard step. Now it lays that out nice and clearly on the player aides, but there are still more steps. And it might not just be the turn proper, it could be the round. Sagrada is an example of where a turn is just taking and placing a die, but you need to explain how the draft works in terms of order. We’re not talking about the fine details yet, we’re just looking at the bigger picture.

4 – The actions step is where we get into the details and the longest part of teaching the game. The theme/pitch of the game, and win conditions should be fast, the turn or round information should pretty fast, but this is where it slows down a little bit. Go through all the different actions that people can take, that means explaining the backside of the cards in Welcome To…, walking through the actions in Pandemic, or how to place the dice and how to use special abilities in Sagrada.

With the actions, however, we’re still just going to teach the basic actions. If there’s going to be an exception to one, call out that there will be and come back to it during the exceptions section of your teach. These are going to be the things that everyone is able to do on every turn across the board. This is made much harder by asymmetrical games, but those are unfortunately always going to be a beast to teach.

5 – In the exceptions step, we’re looking to teach the important exceptions in a situation. For Pandemic, that might how the medic cures versus how everyone else does. How the Dispatcher moves people versus the rest of the game. We’re talking about the exceptions or special rules that are big. This is also the point in time where you have already talked that there are special actions in Sagrada, now you can go over what they do.

There are going to be some exceptions that you aren’t going to teach. These are going to be the positive exceptions, not the negative ones. They are going to be the ones that you teach when they happen in the game. So we’re talking about the ones where you get a bonus or get to do something special because of a situation in the game, and as the teacher you’re looking to teach those in the moment in the game instead of getting it bogged down now. However, if it’s a really bad consequence to an exception or special rule, teach that before the moment so it doesn’t feel like a “gotcha” or trap.

6 – Finally, set-up the game, now, for something like Pandemic, you can do this while you go. For something like Welcome To… or Sagrada, probably wait. This is going to allow you to do a few things, in both of them, now you’re teaching the specific scoring for that game. What extra things do you want to consider when drafting or placing dice in Sagrada. What are the three building permits that you’re working to complete in Welcome To…? Now, all the set-up shouldn’t happen now and for some games, Lords of Hellas, for example, you’ll want to have most of the game set-up before people get there. We’re just talking about finishing off those final touches for getting ready to play in that case, so you can explain the specific things for the start of your game.

Now, I know that sounds like a lot. But besides teaching the actions, the main meat of the game, you aren’t going to be spending a ton of time on the other parts. Exceptions and special rules, especially if the game has a long teach in the action part, should go by quickly. Same with set-up, if it’s a big game, Lords of Hellas or even something like Blood Rage, do set-up while you teach. That’s going to give people a really obvious visual example.

That is one thing that I didn’t talk about much, when you are teaching, we are showing as well. When you talk about a phase in a turn or a round, demonstrate it, if you can. When you explain an action, demonstrate it on the board if you can. These are contrived examples, but seeing while hearing is going to help people’s retention of the information and have less questions further down the line. Also, putting things in people’s hands can be helpful as well. If you’ve explained a deck and it needs to be shuffled and placed, hand it off to someone else to shuffle and place it. This might seem like it distracts, but it mainly gives that player a feeling of ownership of helping getting the game up and running smoothly.

With all of this said, finally, remember, you’ll probably never teach a game perfectly for everyone at the table. We’re just trying to present the information as easily or as usefully as possible for the greatest number of people. There are people who need to muddle their way through two turns before they get a game no matter if you’re the best teacher in the world. There are going to be people who think after hearing how the rounds go that they know how to play the game and will checkout at that point no matter what. As the teacher, it’s not about being able to teach it so that everyone is 100% engaged all the time, but to teach it so that most of the people at the table understand most of the game and then you go from there and play and teach in the game.

What tips or tricks have you found for teaching games? Are there anythings that have made teaching some games easier than others?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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