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Showerthought: I think heavy euros are actually easier to learn than party games, and my Saturday game night proved it
Everyone in my group says party games are the easy entry point, but I had the opposite thing happen at my place in Boise last Saturday. I pulled out a copy of Lisboa to teach two friends who had never played anything heavier than Codenames, and they picked up the rules in about 25 minutes while we ate pizza. Then later that same night, we tried a party game with hidden roles, and it went terrible. Nobody could remember who did what, two people lied by accident, and one guy just sat there confused the whole time. The euro had a rulebook with clear phases and a player aid, so they always knew their next move. The party game had almost no rules but relied on reading people and quick thinking, which is way harder for new folks. I think we confuse 'few rules' with 'easy to learn' and it messes up how we pick games for new players. Has anyone else had a teaching night go the exact opposite of what they expected?
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jordan_morgan796d ago
My buddy Nate ran into this same thing at his place in Reno last month, where Splendor went over way smoother with total newbies than a round of Werewolf did. The reason is simple: euros give you something to look at and point to when you get stuck, but hidden role games ask you to read faces and remember what everyone said five minutes ago, and that's a skill most people haven't built up yet. So the real fix is to stop judging games by page count and start asking whether the game tells you what to do or makes you figure it out on your own.
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