Jacob Davenport on Teaching Games

After I read this article about Teaching Games on Jacob Davenport's site, I suddenly realized how few people write about the art of teaching a game to someone, and what a useful piece of information that is.

Here, for example, is just the first paragraph of this article:

"Give your players information in the order they need to know it. First start with a summary of the game and the goal. When the goal is stated first, your discussion has direction. As you teach the game, players will imagine themselves playing it, and they need to know where they are going and how to get there. Even if the goal is simply to score points, and you will need a lot of explanation before players know how they get to score those points, you should still first tell them that they are competing to score the most points."

Clear, obvious, common sense, and yet, how many times has a game been taught to you like this?


from Bernie DeKoven's FunLog