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The Picard Maneuver
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So, the secret to immortality is to read out loud incredibly long and complicated board game rules?!? Who’da thought…?
Another fan of The Campaign For North Africa.
Yep, been there, done that. The board game I am working on has currently manual that is 36 pages long. And I know it is too long. Working on it.
That is an accurate representation of how I felt when no one showed up having done any prep for the first time playing Gloomhaven. Sent rulebook PDF and how to play video links over a week ahead of time too.
I don’t remember Gloomhaven, but JotL and Frosthaven both had very good tutorial levels that got you started with the concepts without needing any prior knowledge. Maybe they learnt from GH.
Once around 2000, a friend invited me over to play a tabletop game called Talisman. When I got there, we made drinks and then settled into setting it all up. He had the core game plus a lot of expansions in large bins. Two hours later, we had the board and all the expansions set up. I was exhausted by then, but gamely agreed we had to play now that we set it all up. Four hours later we called it a night but we had not actually determined the winner of that game.
So yeah… been there.
“Let’s just start, I’ll learn the rules better that way.”
So long as you are ok with just losing your first game I don’t see a problem with just diving in. First game doesn’t have to be perfect.
ProZD – https://youtu.be/gUrRsx-F_bs
There are YouTube videos that do a better job of explaining the rules very briefly. Better to just put that on the phone.
I do find that the rules explanation really speeds up when everyone has died of old age and no longer interrupts it for bathroom and snack breaks.
I feel this in my soul… sometime around when Catan got popular I lost all ability/patience/interest to learn new tabletop games.
Ah yes, time for some Campaign for North Africa
Played superfight the other day and the 1 minute explanation was delightful. “Draw x cards, pick one of each color, grab a random one from the draw deck, you each have 30 seconds to convince the table that your character is the best.”
I can’t imagine board-games surviving the age of rotted attention spans.
Maybe they’ll be kept alive in some form for the small subset of autistic gamers who love to arrange and lay out thousands of little markers and plastic troops to stage an invasion on cardboard Poland, but they’ll likely be print-out plans and 3D-printer files you can download for free.
The days of opening up a shrink-wrapped box of tiny markers and dice and gameboards all arranged in a commercially pleasing tray with a thick rulebook are likely going to come to an end.
Your lack of imagination can become compensated by a little research.
Yeah I think people are looking for more social alternative to video games.
Though you have stuff like jackbox, and plenty of games that incorporate your smart phone now.
it’s also the fact that even if the percentage of people who have shit attention span is increasing, the population as a whole is also increasing and thus you still end up with more people who don’t mind taking their time.