1. Don’t just read from the rule book.
   This seems pretty obvious, but the amount of times people just start reading verbatim from the rule books is way to high. Instead know the rules yourself, and be able to teach them in the order that makes the most sense to you, and in the detail that you think your players need.
2. Show and Tell is Key
   Don’t just say, there are four types of cards, pull out one of each of those types of cards and point to them as you talk about them. Maybe there is a certain way a character moves, in that case, move the character on the board so people can see how they move.
3. Have Players Help
   How can you help if you are learning the game? Well, maybe there is a deck of cards that need to be placed in a certain spot after being shuffled, give that out as a job to someone. Or maybe there are resources that need to be placed out in certain spots that are fairly obvious, once you’ve taught about the resources, have a player or the players put them out.
4. Save Special Rules
   This might be just me, but I recommend that you save rare rules until the end or until they happen. If the rule is going to be common enough, but isn’t tied into any part of the game, save that rule until the end. If the rule is going to only come up in a given situation that is rare, save it until it happens as long as it isn’t too mean. You’ll have to be the judge of what too mean is, but if it’s going to seriously hurt a player or knock them out of the running, you have to decide if you’re either going to mention it at the start or if you’re going to let them undo the turn.
5. Let them Undo Their Turn (or part of it)
   This isn’t going to be something that players can do often. Once a player has made a mistake once, players don’t get free passes any more because they’ve heard the rule while you were teaching and seen the rule in play. Also, if it’s a complex turn, don’t let players undo their whole turn just because they forgot or didn’t understand a rule because that will slow down the game too much. Just call it a practice game or first game mistake, they are understandable.
6. Explain the Theme/Story of the Game
   Do this with the game at the very start of explaining the rules. This is going to keep people interested from the start. Along with that, tie stuff in to the story or theme of the game as you go along. In SeaFall, they have information about how to do an event for exploring (forget the title of it) and you do the same thing for other events besides exploring. Instead of just call it by it’s generic name, tie it into exploring as you explain and then tell what else it can be used for at the end. Since it’s tied into theme, people are likely to remember it better.

   

These are some of the big tips that I would give for teaching a game. I don’t always love teaching games, so understand that you might not always want to. Then the decision is with you do you want to struggle through it some, or do you want to play a different game? If you’re the leader of your board game group, you’re going to have to get used to teaching. So determine what is going to work best for your group. Maybe you can get into the small details of the game and that’s fine for your group, maybe you have to play a sample game so that people can see how the game works that way, but learn from experience and expect to still have to teach as you play.

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The first story has us facing off against monsters that are invading your lands, and you have to get a message to the elves that live in the woods to let them know. It’s not very epic, but the first scenario does an awesome job of teaching you how to play the game. It teaches you combat, it teaches you how fog works and how you can find things, and it teaches you have the action system works and how the story progresses. The action system and the story system are two of the really cool features of the game. The action system is set-up in a day, but they recognize that you can’t work 24 hours a day, so you can work hard for 7 hours a day without any issue, and you can push yourself, spending your willpower (a resource basically to determine your effectiveness in combat and HP), to work longer. The other fun thing is that story track. You are using these cards to tell a story, and there are letters that basically are parts of the story. So in the first story, only some letters had story bits on them, but whenever you move forward a day, the story track progresses, but not only that, whenever you kill a monster, the story track progresses, this means that you are deciding which monsters can be left alive so that you can complete the main objective, at the same time trying to figure out which monsters need to be killed so that they don’t make it into the castle and you lose the game that way. It is a fun countdown to try and figure out what is going on.

One thing that I don’t love about the game, though, is that you can play the same characters over and over again, maybe I really like to be the wizard (or the archer or the fighter or the dwarf???), and I want to play them again, the scenarios are built that your character doesn’t keep anything from what they’ve had in the previous legend. So every time I start out, my hero is my plain old vanilla hero. It would be way more awesome if we got to build up our hero over time. I realize why they don’t do that, the scenarios are balanced so that you start at 0, and leveling up your character in the strength of their attack or in their willpower goes pretty fast, so you’d have super powered characters by the end that wouldn’t need to do those strength or willpower actions anymore, and it would happen pretty early on in your third story out of the base five. But that would have been something cool that they could have done.

But going back to some fun things, one thing that I do like about this game is that the game isn’t too heady. Yes, it will be tough, and yes, you’ll lose, but it’s fast to reset the board and it’s a game that you can play with a middle school age kid and they’ll be a part of the game. Plus it’s cooperative, so that means that if they need help, they can get help, at the same time, anyone can point out something that you would have missed as well. And another cool thing to add onto the cool things stack is that you can buy more scenarios. Once you’ve figured out how to beat one you’ll have to forget before you can play it again (or come up with a scoring system to see if you can beat it), but you can buy more scenarios, which is cool, so it might be a bit of a money pit that way, but the base game comes with five legends, so five evenings of playing a game, that’s not too bad, plus it’ll probably be more because you’ll lose multiple times.

Overall this is a really fun game that does something awesome for a game that has a number of rules, it teaches you how to play in the first game. This game and Krosmaster are two games that do that, and Seafall is a game that  pretends to hint that it might do that, and then completely lies about it. Legends of Andor is a game that I’d recommend, especially to people who enjoy fantasy based games. It feels like a light fantasy world that you get to play, or like YA fantasy would be a good way to put it, but that’s all it needs to be. And I’ve played it with three people twice and it’s fun to play at that level, and they do things to balance it out for fewer or more players.

Overall Grade: B

Gamer Grade: B-

Casual Grade: B+

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