Players want to know everything so they don’t make mistakes and can enjoy the first play, hopefully scoring well at the end. When you are teaching a game, it can be OK to spend 15 minutes explaining all the rules before you start. The next part is the trickiest and where you need to assess your game and find your own solution, as you need to get to the gameplay as quickly as possible. At the end of the game the player with the most points will win, so let’s take a look at how we do that.” Get to the gameplay as fast as possible We’re going to play over 5 days, and on each day, we’ll get fish, explore the island, and rescue cats that we then need to place on our boats and keep happy in order to score points. We’ve just heard the evil Lord Vesh is on his way to the Isle of Cats and while we can’t stop him, we can get there first and rescue as many cats as possible before he arrives. “The Isle of Cats is a 1 – 4 player game where we play the role of the citizens of Squall’s End. Here’s the introduction I use for The Isle of Cats: You should not start summarising rules or give examples as that will come later in the process. The introduction to the game should be kept short, it should introduce the theme and what you are trying to do. It also helps to stop people overthinking their decisions (as there won’t be a winner) which can speed up the demo as well. This is important as nothing can be more frustrating than thinking you are playing a full game, only to be told it’s time to stop. The first thing I do with every group is set expectations, I make sure they are aware they will only be playing some of the game and that it should take about 30 minutes. I typically aim for 30 minutes from the moment someone sits at the table to the moment they leave.įor the purposes of this article, I will talk through my process for The Isle of Cats which typically takes 60 – 90 minutes to play and 15 minutes to teach. This means I have a lot to do including working out how best to demonstrate my games.Ĭonventions can be expensive and with some games taking 1 – 2 hours to play, plus additional time to teach, it’s important to find a way to allow people to experience the game in the shortest time possible. Next week I will be attending the UK Games Expo and it will be the first show I have attended for a couple of years due to the pandemic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |