Out of context of what you said: Go is perfect. It’s the perfect game to discuss here.
You can teach the game in about 30 seconds; I mean, it may take a bit longer if you’re going to start talking about Ko and Superko, but you can generally explain the broad strokes in one breath.
Quick shout out for Crokinole which has about five rules and can be taught in under a minute.
Just with games I own:
Filler Games Love Letter Fluxx Shobu Herbaceous Sunset over Water High Society although that can run longer than a filler
Standard Length Quickteach Santorini Canvas
I was going to say Kanagawa but sometimes that takes ages to teach
Importance:
Very important to have a quick-teach for all kinds of different gaming groups - public meetups, inexperienced friends. It’ll ease them into sitting still for more complicated games later.
For a while Red 7 was the card case that was always in my pocket. I’ll play Sea Salt and Paper with almost anyone, but it doesn’t quite qualify as pick-up-and-go. On the other hand Flip 7 definitely does.
Pit sounds silly and it is. It gets very noisy like a trading room so best to be mindful of other gamers on your neighbouring tables engrossed with their Euros, Splotters, and trains.
Hol’s der Geier - even simpler than Knizia’s auction games.
Pitchcar - your drunk friends can even help you set up. It’s part of the fun.
Some filler card games I can happily teach to people in next to no time:
6 nimmt
No Thanks
Forks
Get Bit
Snake Oil
Some non-card games:
Martian Dice
Tsuro
Hey, that’s my fish
Diamant
Lacuna
Telestrations
And only very slightly more complex:
High Society
For Sale
Hive
Probably more besides. I have other games which I consider easy to teach, but the ones I’ve listed here would probably all be quicker to teach than the rest.
The biggest game I think of as a quick teach is Mysterium – provided you have a ghost who already knows the game. It’s not quick to set up, but once it is set up you can explain the game to the other players incredibly quickly (and/or explain things as you go – which is easy, as all the players are going through the same processes and will be discussing them with one another regardless).
Typically those are party games.
My hall of fame obviously includes the games I keep mentioning every other thread:
Just One
So Clover / So Kleever
The Gang
Codenames (being able to play this drunk is another premise entirely)
Dexterity games seem to be quick to teach. They may or may not work after a drink or two though
Tinderblox
Dropolter: just don’t drop the bells
Menara ( there is a bit more there but not a lot, although it might be harsh to teach this to drunk people)
Die Knuffies
Nekojima
Some silly card games
6 nimmt
Kakerlakensalat (and others of the same ilk like Do-De-Li-Do) → actually it seems being drunk when taught seems to be a requirement. We have introduced quite a few new vegetables that way.
That’s not a hat
Games to play for as long as the group feels like it and that need almost no teaching
Fake Artist. One of you doesn’t know the word I am just writing on these papers here. Pick a colored pen. We take turns drawing. Now draw.
Dixit, just look at the pictures and imagine …
Or mix the two previous ones to get Detective Club
Concept (at least with the abstractionist techies I know): Just put markers on the symbols to explain the word, don’t use your actual words.
Link City
Some *less party, more game* games. Some might still consider some of these filler games
Cascadia: I think it is a rather simple teach: just take one of these 4 pairs and put them in your landscape. Over here are the patterns you want to make. Nope you can put the animal on any tile that doesn’t have one, you don’t have to place it on the one you picked just now.
Beacon Patrol: Orient your tiles like so and let me show you my first turn.
Kingdom Builder: this has to be one of the easier teaches around.
Sushi Go–once they get the drafting…
Azul, the OG version without any complications
Kingdomino
Games I can probably teach quickly because I have played them so much that I can shorten the teach
I think there’s a category for card games that have enough cross over with traditional card games to be easy to teach to people who have played card games. For my collection 6 Nimmt! is the star of this category. A lot of climbers and trick takers will fit here too.
Positional abstracts I think can have a similar category. A lot of people have played draughts/checkers, chess and go so something in that wheel house has a lower conceptual barrier for people to overcome. Not my area but I enjoyed Ingenious with @RogerBW so maybe that could be in this category? Other suggestions welcome.
Of my collection I think there are some standouts here. The Climbers has very accessible rules which can be taught very quickly. Above a filler level I’d say due to the closeness to an abstract.
Paris Connection/SNCF has a ton of depth, so much emergent gameplay with both strategy and tactics and hardly any rules. This is I think number one on my personal list
Guillotine has it’s problems but it’s incredibly accessible and less hobbyist gamers I’ve played it with all have a blast.
Celestia has always been a hit and can be taught really quickly. I think these days I prefer The Legend of the Cherry Tree That Blossoms Every Ten Years, however the binus rules are fiddly and a little counter intuitive so they stop it being a breeze to teach. Also Celestia goes above 4 players.
Sumeria is a very neat area control game that is mercifully quick to teach and satisfyingly full if you can get past the dry theme and looks.
The mighty RoboRally is also really straight forward to teach. The cards all make sense really quickly however the grit is stuff that activates on the map. This can be mitigated with a straight forward selection that mainly sticks to conveyors. I’ve still only played the ~2005 version so no comment on newer editions.
The last game I taught was Crokinole… and I made a hash of it. The rules are fairly straight-forward, but I managed to confuse my partner while explaining them.
I’m not sure I have much to share on this thread, as, outside of Crokinole, I haven’t needed to teach any games, except to my children, for quite some time.
However, I was contemplating and trying to think of “what is the easiest game in my collection to teach?” Are there any games that you can just “start and we’ll learn as we go”, as requested by so many people
I agree Robo Rally is not a difficult teach and belts are very straightforward. i would say i needs someone with a good grasp of everything at the table though and i wouldn’t teach it to my dad but my friend’s son’s quickly picked it up and the older one is in 2nd or 3rd grade…
My worry over “pick it up as you go along” is that if I don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on I may base my strategy on a misunderstanding of some minor point before anyone has thought to explain it. Then I feel unhappy.
Yeah, I feel like that’s the guaranteed outcome of “pick it up as we go” style of learning.
If they start with the assumption, “I win”, then everything they learn about the game is going to undermine their strategy. Oddly, I think there’s a high coincidence between someone assuming “I win” and saying “Let’s just start playing and we’ll learn as we go”
We mostly did Settlers this way. I mean, there was a little bit of explanation, but after about 1 minute of foundational rules we’d jump in and explain the rest over the first 2 or 3 rounds.
I definitely teach Skull this way. (Everyone put down a coaster, any of them. Now another. Ok, now I’m going to say a number…)
Great Plains a little bit. I’ll guide the first few turns to hit on the rules (if you go here, you get a token. Now, the token does…)
Silver I’m still working out. It seems like this should be possible. But everyone (EVERYONE) gets hung up for the first several games by “card actions trigger if you draw and discard, but NOT if you discard from your board.” Simple enough, but I can’t stop people from trying to activate cards after replacing them on the board.
Mountain Goats definitely. Roll the dice, ok, now you can arrange them to…
But I think in all of these I’m setting up a tutorial, either directing the actions or pausing at the important moments to explain a rule.
Regarding the switcheroo problem, sometimes we start over after the simulation (esp. Skull, we don’t score the first round) or give free undos to shift the game state. Or I tell them what move to make for a few rounds (for the tutorial thing) so they don’t misplay anything prior to the relevant information being given. Did really well in Caverna with that, where I told her what to do for the first few rounds or gave simple A or B choices, explaining the benefits, until all the mechanics had been touched on.
My Forks teach is to play a full game as fast as possible with everyone making random card selections, so that I can demonstrate how the scoring works at the end of that game (which is the thing you actually need to understand). Then we play the real games. The only up-front explanation is (1) the theme, and (2) how/why I’m going to teach it the way that I do. The dummy game is extremely quick (as no one is making actual decisions), and I think it pretty much guarantees that everyone understands exactly how the game works.
I could try to short-cut it by just dealing a dummy end-game state and scoring it, but it doesn’t take very much longer to actually ‘play’ the hands, and I think that is worthwhile to cement the gameplay in people’s minds.
I think it can work very well if everyone accepts that likelihood as a risk; and especially if the game is a short one such that you can follow the learning game with one or more additional games.
I guess it falls under the “different people learn differently” / “teaching is hard” umbrella, though. You could explain all the rules in full detail before playing, and players who don’t learn well from explanations alone might then base their strategy on a misunderstanding of some minor point, and feel unhappy.