Sure, the best way to learn is someone explaining the game to you live, but thats not always available.
What do you do? Read the manual, watch videos or something else? Any specific creator to recommend?
I usually read the rulebook, then find a video (ideally “Watch It Played”, Rodney is a treasure) to confirm my understanding of what I read and/or clarify anything I didn’t. This is usually sufficient. Another cheeky way to learn a game is to play it on BoardGameArena where the system won’t allow you to play the game wrong.
I usually watch a video after reading the rules and trying to play for a little bit. It usually helps cover the gaps in understanding or areas that I’ve misinterpreted the rules, while also allowing myself to become familiar enough with the game that I don’t get lost.
This is closer to my process. I give the rulebook a first pass, push some pieces around, and then I look for something like a 10min video that goes over turn actions in detail or exceptions to check my understanding of what I did when I was playing multi-handed. A trick I find that works well is to “build the world”:
- Look at components, what does each piece represent, what are spaces on a map, what is the nuance between similar spaces/pieces. Are there things listed on the board that are tracks or warnings or things like that.
- What’s a turn look like; how are actions selected, what actions are options, etc.
- What special things do I need to be aware of
- How does scoring function.
3 gets short shift before watching the video, but I do it this way because what they talk about in scoring makes little sense if I don’t know what the components are, etc.
I tend to follow the game’s set-up process and then watch a How-to-Play video, if one exists!
I’ll then try and parse the rulebook with the knowledge from the video, and if I have the time, I’ll even try a couple of dummy rounds by myself to get a feel of how it should work.
My process used to be:
- Read the rules before everyone arrives
- Play the game and have fun
- Read the rules again
- Email everyone with everything we played wrong
Now that I have kids I don’t always have the luxury of reading the rules the same day we play the game, so what I usually do is I read the rules a few days in advance, which means I won’t remember as much when the time comes to play, so then I end up complementing that with a rules explanation video.
Read the setup and basic rules, start playing and read up specifics as they become relevant.
Depends on the type of game of course, but its usually fun even if we end up playing it kinda wrong in the beginning
This is how we do it as well. Prevents you from reading for hours on end. This way it’s fun and rules tend to be remembered better as well.
If we do read up on the rules before starting we have to go back to the rulebook during play anyway because it’s often difficult to remember everything you just read.
