This is exactly how I conceptualized gateway games. I’ve stopped worrying about mechanisms so much and in having focused on the feeling one gets playing the game has helped me introduced more interesting stuff to my more apprehensive or intimidated friends. Do we want to frustrate each other? Do we want constant tension? Do we want to make tough decisions? Do we want to feel like we’ve built something? Those questions have done more than anything. I can’t remember who touched on that in the old forum, but that advice completely changed the way I look at gateway as a descriptor. I tend to think of it as “a game that allows you to introduce someone to a particular emotional experience with a game with minimal overhead.”
I feel like I’ve never found a consensus on gateway, so I’m going with that.
There’s a competition ethos in there too. If I beat you, am I going to do it by directly frustrating your plans? Or are you going to fall behind in a race? Or do we all succeed or fail together? The first of those, the “take-that” game, is a sort I tend not to advance to new gamers, especially if it’s heavily skill-dependent.
I find trying to forget the mechanism is the best thing for me, and sticking to theme and explaining things in terms of the theme.
As an example, I taught my other half how to play Everdell last night. To do it I worked backwards from the end goal (get points), but never explained worker placement. Instead I tried to frame it like “so you can send your hedgehog here and he’ll get you some resin, so you can pay for those cards”. And instead of “that critter costs three berries, unless you’ve already constructed this building” , it was more like “if you build this building, then the worker gets to go there for free, his place is already there”.
And as a rule to myself, whenever I teach someone a new game, if there’s a screw you mechanism of any kind, I purposely won’t use it. There’s already enough for them to remember that a + b = c, without feeling like they’re being attacked by someone who knows what they’re doing.
And I think something being gateway or not depends heavily on your audience and the theme of the game. Everdell for an example isn’t exactly heavy, but has more going on than some WP games, but I know the art and theme would hold engagement. If I tried the same with something sci fi or war themed, or a really dry euro, I know it wouldn’t have worked for me.
I just looked at a review of a game I recently acquired. There was a section about ‘rules and teaching’. In relation to this thread I wondered, is there actually any value in that segment?
Maybe it’s too broad as all reviews with their inherent subjectivity makes what I’m saying meaningless. But with the reviewer the board game literacy of their game group is so unknown that it’s especially difficult to calibrate. Also how do you know if they’re good or bad at teaching games over all and then accounting for preference to style of rule book? For taste in games you can at least build up a frame of reference in comparison to your own. Another thing to slightly annoy me about some reviews.
As to gate way games it seems to be a term that’s maybe shifted over time and mass use. I’d have suggested a quality needed for a game to be classed as gate way is fame if you want to class a game that way away from your own experience. Settlers being the apex here. It got a lot of people in to the hobby board games world it was known beyond the established circles this forming the gateway. Alternatively the term could have meant ‘the game that started it for me’.
While I think I still feel there is a core to those ideas that I could refine in to how I’d still like to define the term for my use/association I don’t think it holds water anymore. It’s now used to imply something about weight and depth, maybe slightly dismissively maybe not, but also something I might mot want to play but someone less literate would enjoy with their less refined palate.
The thing that sort of strikes me as odd about this is that various of the big games have huge amounts of replay-ability. People players hundreds of games of settlers.
Going back to the topic after me being unreasonably salty on my early post: Our group had this discussion a while ago about how weirdly difficult it is to teach The Crew and Skull King. Despite them being filler card games. Knowing that there are newcomers in our group, we often teach the fundamentals first, and then the game next. Teach them the concept of trick taking or worker placement, then rules of the game next. Not sure if this is what you guys are already doing.
This is also a personal choice of mine: I also tend to avoid games that relies too much on “juggling of mechanisms”. A lot of games do this to create weight on them. Have several mechanisms working in parallel and force players to pay attention to them all at the same time. This is why GWT is so breezy. I doesnt force you to pay attention to everything at once, despite having lots of systems in it.
The polar opposite of that is Flotilla. There’s so much going on in that game at any one time. Multiple rondels, a buy/sell price track that changes on every use, role cards for each turn, dice which get moved around and added to or changed, plus, at any point you can flip your tiles and play the second part of the game which has different rules and scoring, and means you don’t directly interact with the players who are still ‘topside’. Its a lovely looking game with lots of nice things, but it’s so hard to learn, let alone teach.
If the theme matches up well with the mechanics, I think it’s much easier to teach a game to people who aren’t familiar with the dialect of board games. Unfortunately, I’m not that good at judging when that is…
The most complex games I’ve managed to teach people who aren’t already up to their eyeballs in the hobby are Pandemic and Quacks of Quedlinburg. Quacks is by far the hardest of those to teach, partly because the theme makes a lot of sense… until it doesn’t. The fact that the game’s currency is represented on the board by bubbles seems to trip a lot of people up. I’ve started beginning the explanation for Quacks with “this game is basically blackjack”, which seems to alleviate some of the confusion.
I actually really like the Blackjack analogy. The mechanics are fun, but the implementation of the theme is so abstract. I had such a hard time trying to explain that when introducing people to it in TTS that I think I basically lost their interest before I started.
It seems like the sort of game that would be quite fiddly in TTS, or was it ok? I think I’d be sad because my favourite part of that game is rummaging around in the bag!
No. It was easy. Shuffling and pulling bits. Even the market is fine. The fact that there isnt a bunch of mounds of wooden bits all over the table makes TTS cleaner
Theme seems to matter differently to non-hobby-boardgamers.
To me, a thematic game is one in which I’m put in the role of a particular entity, and I have to make decisions like the ones that entity would make. (E.g. in Firefly I’m playing a starship captain, and I have to decide where to fly, what jobs to take, what upgrades to buy, what crew to hire.)
To them, a thematic game is one that is “about” a thing they’re interested in. I’ve read a post interviewing a birdwatcher who was being lured into gaming by Wingspan even though there’s nothing particularly thematic about the gameplay, because it has birds and birdy things all over it and that’s a thing they already cared about.
That’s a good point. I can tie the theme of Wingspan into the gameplay for a few sentences, but it quickly goes off the rails:
You are a conservationist and your board is a new wildlife sanctuary. To get birds in your sanctuary you need to have the right food to lure them to their favourite habitat. If you get a good combination of birds you can train them to bring you lots of stuff, like eggs to put in other birds’ nests… Wait, what?
Do you think there are any good examples where the two definitions of “thematic” overlap? The closest I’m getting is Pandemic or Flash Point, but I think that’s because my tastes skew more towards the puzzly and abstract.
I think those two are good ones - Pandemic is perhaps a bit more abstracted than Flash Point. Firefly is non-gamer-thematic as well as gamer-thematic too - you have people, gear and ships from the show.
Is there an example of something that is gamer-thematic but not non-gamer-thematic? So you’re making decisions an actual entity would make, but it doesn’t have the dress to appeal to someone who’s interested in the subject?
Tigris & Euphrates is the first thing that came to mind. I find it thematic, I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t.
Innovation is another, and maybe a better example because it is even more abstract without a map. I find it thematic because it ably captures the rise and fall of civilisations, with periods of intense innovation, self-immolation, lulls… all kinds of interesting non-military stuff that many progress-along-the-track style of Civilization games completely fail to evoke. It’s all just card effects though, and I can imagine a non-gamer finding it almost devoid of theme.
Where the heck does Roll Player fit? Try explaining that theme to someone completely unfamiliar with TTRPGs. Even among gamers it may fall flat if they have no experience with RPG systems. Meanwhile in reality it’s a pasted-on theme that seems to knock the socks off some while bouncing off others completely! Yet it’s mechanically juicy and easy to play for anyone that likes a dynamic puzzle.
So we have an abstract dice allocation game with an elaborate theme that seems to appeal/repel gamers and non-gamers alike. Huh!
Roll Player is firmly in the “Hey, D&D players, you know what it’s like to endlessly create new characters right? What if there were a game involved?”
If the audience doesn’t already know the significance of “roll 4d6, keep 3”, then what you actually want to play with them is Sagrada - which is a game I prefer to Roll Player.
The exception is, perhaps, Roll Player as a solo experience - I’m not 100% sold on it yet but I did enjoy it better than when playing with others; that is primarily a function of me not having to feel self-conscious about my AP with Roll Player when playing solo.
I prefer it multiplayer by a pretty large margin over solo. I completely agree it’s largely a solo experience even with opposition, but in this case I think that’s totally ok. The main reason is… theme, actually. It’s pretty easy to make some educated guesses about what your opponents might try to grab from the markets at any given point, which takes a lot of the sting out of the truly random steals you get from the solo ruleset.
All that said, I play 2P almost exclusively with my partner and we both approach it as an efficiency puzzle with a score comparison at the end. Similar to many roll-and-write games in that regard, really, but super meaty.
As for the AP worries… my partner doesn’t seem to give two craps about how long I sit and wait for her, so why should you, right?
Surprisingly, this was already on my radar! It had a BGG contest quiz thing (I always do every quiz). I chuckled to myself, as well, when I saw it mentioned in an upcoming Kickstarter project roundup as “rondel style dice action placement” also because of this thread!
