Always Teaching

So, I was able to play some Dominion with some friends this weekend, and I noticed one thing: I am always teaching the game to new people. Don't get me wrong. I love introducing people to board/card games, and therefore, I enjoy teaching people the game. This last weekend, we tried playing with 2 new people in a 6 player game of Dominion. Now, the rules suggest that you don't play with 6 and especially with new people. They suggest you instead play 2 games with 3 people at each game. I wanted to give it a shot, though; so, we went ahead and played the 6 player game. The game took seemingly forever. All told the game lasted about 2.5 hours. Anyone who is familiar with Dominion knows that is much too long. So, it got me thinking about 2 things:

1) Why am I always playing my games with new people?

2) Can I do the teaching better or administer the game better to where it would go faster even with new people.

For number 1, there are two answers. The first answer is that I am not always teaching new people. I am often playing with my family, and they all know how to play my games already. The second answer is that I have just begun teaching my group of friends these games. There are about 10 of us in the group, and there are not many times we are all able to get together. So, I have taught some people in the group, and this last weekend I taught 2 more people, but there are still others I will eventually need to teach. It seems like I am teaching all the time because I had to teach my family and now I am slowly teaching my friends. So, I do teach often but by no means always.

The answer to the second one is: I have no idea. For one, I will not play a 6 player game of Dominion with even a few brand new players. I will either break the group up into 2 games, or I will pull out a different game and leave Dominion for another time. Other than that, the only thing I have considered is doing a crash course for teaching instead of explaining all the rules beforehand. Currently, I go through all the rules before we start the game. Then we play the game, and I reiterate the rules as we go and clarify any rules that were not clear in the initial explanation. I feel it works well. However, there are always many aspects of the game that just don't make sense until you are in the game, watching the turns of other players, experimenting with your own cards on your turn, and just basically going through the motions of a turn. So, I am considering that next time, I would do a explanation beforehand only saying "The point is to get the most Victory Points. These cards are Victory Points. You can buy them with coins, and the cost is the number in the lower-right corner." That is all I would say. I would then simply say, "I'll start." I would then proceed to take my turn and explain the turn sequence as I went through it. We would probably get to the new people's turns before they understood, but we could simply have them show us their cards, and we could tell them what to do and why to do it. I expect that after going through a few turns, they would understand much better than they would have with a long explanation beforehand, and we would have avoided wasting that time with me blabbing the rules. It is possible that we would spend more time pausing during the game and explaining rules, and maybe it would wash out to all be about the same. Last Saturday, the game paused for rules clarifications or explanations quite a few times, though. So, my thought is that it would be faster to crash right into the action. Since we typically have to pause to explain how that rule I mentioned really works in action, I might as well skip the earlier explanation and just tell all during the pauses. If we have people complain that they would have done something differently "had they known" we can always stop and start over.

I have seen such a technique (of just starting to play) work with simpler games, but I always avoided it even with games like Ticket To Ride because there is just a little more complexity that will immediately affect a player's turn. I feared it would cause them to just become more confused when trying to figure out what they should do (or what they just did on their first hand). I have now convinced myself it is time to disregard that fear. At my next game night, I am going to try crashing into the action with little to know rules explanation. I will then expound upon the rules later. Once I have tried it, I will post to this blog, letting you know how it went.