Reply: Gaia Project:: General:: Re: Why putting advanced techs on tech tracks?

by Thunkd

carbon_dragon wrote:

You must have had VERY bad experiences learning games from others.

I know a couple of people who just are moderately bad teachers. They leave out little things. Later on you find out the real rule for how to play and while they were mostly right, they left out something that didn't seem important to them, but comes up occasionally. I find that kind of thing annoying. I'll often read the rules to a game after being taught by someone, just so I can discover all the little things they left out. Sometimes those little things can make quite a big difference.

Then I know people who absolutely massacre rules. They just can't learn games from a rulebook at all. So when they're the person who learns the game from scratch and teaches it to a group, there's huge glaring issues. I was once taught Taj Mahal by someone who messed up pretty much every rule in the game. To quote my comment on the game

Some rules we had wrong: How you get palaces, how many palaces you can build a turn, how many bonus tiles are available to win, whether your cards go away when you withdraw, how you score for playing palaces, and endgame scoring. As we got deeper and deeper into the game it became apparent that something was wrong and we finally stopped to read through the rules.

To be clear, the first example where someone gets multiple little rules wrong is enough of an issue with me that I don't really enjoy being taught the game by them. I've outright refused to play games being taught by the person in the second example.

But it's a lot easier to learn the game initially from even a middling teacher IMHO.

Maybe it's easier for you. It's very easy for me to understand a written rulebook. I have little to no difficulty picking up most games from a rulebook. That's just the way my brain works. (There are exceptions such when the rulebook is poorly written. I'm looking at you, Portal Games.)

I'd much rather sit with a rulebook and puzzle through something that isn't entirely clear rather than being taught the game from someone else who also struggled with that point in the rulebook and came to a wrong conclusion. I'll keep at it until I'm sure I understand the rule. When someone else teaches me a rule wrong, I have no way to know I've gotten bad information or that I should question and clarify that point. Maybe it's "easier"... but I didn't really "learn the game" when someone teaches me incorrectly.