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Troy Goodfellow

Episode 185: Class is in Session

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This week, Troy, Julian and Bruce welcome back frequent guests Rob Daviau and Bill Abner to talk about the touchy subject of trying to teach games. Though the focus is on board gaming, there are useful lessons about how to approach communication, building the right mindset for the pupil and the challenges of trying to read, teach, play and compete all at once.

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Discussion ran very true, and was well timed for me, as just this last weekend I was teaching Dominion to my parents. Went right from 3 people learning the game cold, absent any context (I'd never played a deck-building game before) which resulted in frustration and everybody giving up on Saturday, to coming back with an expert (me after watching youtube tutorials.) and ending with balancing the desire to win with the desire to teach.

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Really liked hearing from Rob Daviau - some great quotes and background about how game design works in the mass market eg "best part of any game session is opening the box" or "giving a game to players is like sending a teenager out to drive." Maybe I'm a sad academic but I'd love to see what the MIT guys who studied player reactions published about it if anything...

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I really enjoyed how the conversation drifted to screwing up rules playing board games, and competitiveness in board games.

Best wishes to Rob Daviau's new endeavors! He has always been insightful on 3MA, and I am interested in seeing what his game designs look like now that he is free from the shackles of his mainstream corporate overlords.

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Err, how come the main site wasn't updated and still shows 184 as the latest 3MA installment?

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Err, how come the main site wasn't updated and still shows 184 as the latest 3MA installment?

The 3MA guys aren't yet updating the homepage and we dropped the ball, sorry.

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This was an interesting show but usually you were assuming there is only one teacher. In my group its usually three of us working together to teach one new player. In that case it really helps to have one person take charge and the others only chime in if something was skipped over or the explanation is unclear.

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I'd have been curious to hear the panel's take on Vlaada Chvatil's games. Specifically Space Alert and Dungeon Lords (the only I've played) are designed with some obviously deep thought around learning the game. To the point of having components built specifically for scripted learning scenarios (special simplified game boards, canned scripted walkthrough scenarios, etc)

To be honest I find the experience a little too much - I like to just jump into games, but I see the value and appreciate the time and attention that clearly goes into the learning process.

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Space Alert seems to be a special case. For those who aren't familiar, it's a co-op boardgame where players build a queue of actions in real time under pressure, but resolve the actions without realtime pressure. As a result, you aren't necessarily doing what you think you're doing. Hilarity tends to ensue.

I'd agree that attention is paid to onboarding new players, but handing around the new player doc to everyone at an evening's gaming session is going to slow everything down. Yes, well written, yes, even marginally funny, but getting if you could get other players to do homework before showing up at the table, then the whole discussion is moot.

For me, part of the joy in Space Alert is failing disasterously. Misunderstanding the mechanics is a mechanic in and of itself. For that reason, I think it short circuits the teaching and the ASL A.2 rule brilliantly.

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a related discussion I'd be interested is: learning to get good at a strategy game.

Some people seem to enjoy reading up on the main strategies when they're new to a game, while others prefer to work them out for themselves. An example would be when I was learning how to play War of the Ring with a friend. I enjoyed trying to work out the main plays myself, while he enjoyed heading on to the internet to read up on the main paths to victory.

Similar with many computer games. You can make Civ a lot easier for yourself if you go read up some build orders. But then doesn't that take some of the magic away?

Which isn't to say I'm against strategy guides. Especially for things like the Total War games, which do a pretty bad job of giving the player feedback. And I remember that once I'd beaten CivIV on noble (the level with no AI bonuses/handicaps), I enjoyed reading some tips on how to win on higher levels, and discovered the cottage/village economy, etc.

Thoughts?

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"Learning to get good at a strategy game" ought to be where all the fun is. Isn't that the "Chick Parabola"?

For me, I start a game by first playing without aid or help. If the game gets a hold of me and I want to keep playing, I hit the forums and the youtube "let's plays" to see how other people do it. Just when I start to finally get really good at a game I get bored and move on to the next.

I particularly enjoy watching youtube "let's plays." They let you actually watch how another player conducts his/her turn, and this gives you a lot better insight into the thought processes and considerations that a more advanced player goes through.

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Which isn't to say I'm against strategy guides. Especially for things like the Total War games, which do a pretty bad job of giving the player feedback. And I remember that once I'd beaten CivIV on noble (the level with no AI bonuses/handicaps), I enjoyed reading some tips on how to win on higher levels, and discovered the cottage/village economy, etc.

Thoughts?

The best way I found to learn to get better at Civ specifically was to play in the Realms Beyond challenges. They'd set up some screwball scenario and send everyone out to play it, and then solicit the AARs for everyone to sort through. In this case, you'd end up not only with the let's play style, "Hey this is a cottage economy" but the scenarios would also take you out of your comfort zone - no mines, no cottages, no luxuries. I know challenges like this exist for EU, and suspect they must for other games. Boardgame though?

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