I played The Crew (with three players), and Geometric Art (with two players) tonight.
Our third player for The Crew was familiar with trick-taking, but didn’t have a lot of experience with modern games (and certainly hadn’t seen a cooperative trick-taking game before), so we flagrantly ignored most of the rules about not communicating during the game as we worked our way through the training missions, and I’m absolutely convinced that was the correct thing to do.
My previous experience with this game left me feeling awful at the time, because one of the players was struggling to understand how it worked but didn’t feel confident asking outright for more explanation, and so the game’s “no comms” rules was the nail in the coffin of their experience, and I felt responsible for that.
Tonight we talked plenty, which allowed our new player to pick up some unfamiliar concepts without much difficulty, and we all still had a great time with the game. We didn’t play open-handed, but occasionally indicated outright if we had a certain card, and explained exactly what we were doing tactically in order to pull off some difficult objectives, and I think it helped hugely to clarify the gameplay.
I think I would only ever introduce the game in this way in future – totally cheat until I’m confident that everyone truly understands the game. If you’re strict about the comms rules then it’s just not a game which treats the uninitiated kindly; and there are so many missions in the game book that I figure who cares if the first several aren’t played properly – once everyone has a handle on the game, there’s still going to be loads left (and I suspect a higher chance of everyone being interested in playing them).
After that it was the lovely Geometric Art, in which my friend’s ability to construct an instantly-recognisable rose with one spiral, one curve, one line, and two triangles left me amazed and impressed.
Their sheep was mistaken for a mouse, OTOH, but when you’re working under severe constraints these things happen.
(They were also a tad ambitious, when tasked with “body part” as a subject, in attempting to portray a biologically-accurate heart out of a square, a triangle, and some squiggles : )