15 Step Guide Teaching Board Games to New Players

You are central to everyone’s engagement with, and enjoyment of, the board game. You are the compere, teacher, and maybe the venue host too. Background music and the TV are fine while people are arriving, but when it’s time to teach them the rules.

This is especially the case when playing role-playing games where theme informs and structures the game’s world; magic circle; and players’ motivations. Many times it is easier to explain games to highly experienced gamers. Explaining games to new or younger gamers can be challenging. In this case, it helps to introduce simpler “gateway” games to them first in order to develop their game literacy.

Learn the board game yourself before you teach it

Likewise, game hosts also run the risk of “over-explaining the game” by giving players too much information on strategies, tactics, and hints on how to play. Sometimes providing some base level information is fine. However, part of developing player agency is letting your players learn how to best play the game on their own. Now final fantasy that you’ve covered the main aspects of the game including its’ theme, mechanics, core loop, objectives, and choices; it’s time to bring it all together.

How to explain your videogame to new players?

For instance, it helps new Kingdomino players learn how positioning pieces in a certain way opens up the board for them and/or helps them score more points at the end of the game. These visual representations in digital games can be carried over to table top games as well. Comparatively, teaching more complex games to advanced gamers can be relatively easier. An explanation for how to play Twilight Imperium will take longer than how to play Kingdomino. However, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to explain a more complicated game to more experienced gamers by asking them to read and review the rulebook ahead of time. Understanding your players (what they have played before; who they have played with; and what they have enjoyed) helps in teaching them how to play a new game.

Consider how you might order the explanation, or if any of the other advice in the next section might apply. If you still have questions that the rulebook can’t answer, look or ask on BoardGameGeek to see if there’s help there. Hopefully, there are some little nuggets in here that will help you to teach board games to new players. If the board game you’re teaching has a game guide or a quick reference sheet for players, then hand them out now. I work as a games teacher at a board game café, and I thought I would stop by to cover some basic rules I try to follow when introducing players to a new game. Even if you’re the most competitive player in your circle of friends, try to keep those tendencies in check while showing a new game to them.

It’s time to move onto the game objective after covering theme; who the players are; and why they are doing something. Specifically what players have to do to be successful at the game. However, one of the most promising ways of explaining a new game to someone is by starting with the theme.

The time that you spend preparing to host a game will be well worth it for your players’ experiences. Different strategies, exceptions, and edge cases always arise in games. However, they have their place in the order and priority in which hosts explain how games work and what players can do within them. Even the best hosts and the most experienced students will occasionally need some additional help and assistance.

So once the basics are explained, it’s best to jump into the game and start playing. It’s the only way everything will come together and click in the new player’s mind. If you like any combination of lying, storytelling, outsmarting your opponents, or tying helpless victims to train tracks, you might like some of my writing on games. Ivan is our wordsmith extraordinaire and a passionate board gamer and RPG veteran. A gaming nerd since an early age, he got started with computer gaming back in the ZX Spectrum days (yeah, he is that old) and with board gaming while playing Monopoly as a kid.

However, final scores are determined by players’ weakest color in points. You might be able to plan based on how they learn best. Explaining the game rules without the game components is quite tricky. So, it’s worthwhile to lay out the components in front of the future players from the beginning and introduce them after presenting the game’s objective. Game boards, tokens, markers, etc., all have their unique functions, and superficial knowledge of them from the start aids the understanding of the rules.

A lot of that great experience comes from how you teach the board game. If you’re teaching a board game to people, chances are that you love it and you want to play it with people who enjoy it too. The way you teach is crucial to whether everyone likes the game or not. Once the test round is done, everyone should be at least somewhat comfortable with playing the game for real. Over the course of the game, both players will constantly be exchanging all 5 movement cards, but each player only possesses 2 of the movement cards at any time. The game starts with both players possessing 2 of the 5 movement cards, with 1 shared neutral movement card.

The one board game teaching tip to rule them all

It’s finally time to teach your first game, so where do you start? While it may seem intimidating at first, teaching games becomes much easier with a system in place, so here are some basic building blocks to think of. The most important thing to remember when choosing a game is to choose one that’s quick to teach and simple to play.

Questions during the actual gameplay will invariably come up but if you can get them out of the way earlier it makes for a less fragmented play experience. It seems obvious but catching the student’s interest is really critical because it will engage them for the rest of the introduction. If you know your subject’s tastes you can offer them the aspects that they will be drawn to first. Maybe they will like the airships, or the tactical combat, or the story told through flavor text. I have some friends that much prefer Euro style games more than American style dice rolling games, so I can often determine what aspects of a game’s design will pique their interest the most. Of course, you don’t want to lie or misrepresent a game.

Many designers struggle with properly explaining their games to new players, but today’s post looks at some important questions to consider when trying to teach the player. Only after this do we delve into explaining the game‘s mechanics. It’s beneficial to follow the structure of the official rules; well-made editions emphasize this.