Starting Resources Streamline Teaching

Explaining how to play a board game is a tricky skill to master. The order in which you explain things greatly impacts how well players absorb your explanation. Because game systems are interconnected, some things you explain require understanding events that occur later in the game. One way to make your games easier to explain is by giving players starting resources that allow you to cover concepts that normally become relevant later.

In Lords of Waterdeep, players can send an agent to the Waterdeep Harbor action space to play an Intrigue card from their hand for its effect. Each player is dealt two intrigue cards at the start of the game and may acquire more through other action spaces such as Castle Waterdeep or Cliffwatch Inn. During the explanation, you do not have to explain what an intrigue card is or find examples to show players because they already have two examples in front of them.

Some games have play areas that have no meaning without the objects in them, such as discard piles or groups of tokens. In these cases, it helps to pre-populate these areas during setup with objects solely to clarify the explanation. In Clank!, players place cubes in the Clank! area at the start. This makes it easier for the teacher to explain concepts like gaining and losing Clank! and moving Clank! into the dragon bag. It also helps players trust the balance of the turn order.

In my game Sprocketforge, I give players starting order cards to help explain order completion. However, I do not start players with any gear enchantments, the cardboard pieces inside gears that produce mana. Instead, they draft these at the start. This means that when I explain the game, I have to give a player temporary enchantments to illustrate production mechanics, which is awkward. If I redesigned it, I would have players begin with a starter enchantment to avoid this.

In general, it is good to provide a starting game state that provides natural examples of all the mechanics you need to explain up front. That way, the rules teacher can refer to the actual setup rather than having to engineer an example or rely on player imagination.