Oh man the weekly streak continues and what is this? A follow-up to last weeks post?
I got to play Autobahn and there were two items of note. The first, and very obvious issue, was messing up a rule. What follows is me, for some reason, feeling the need to defend my bad rule teaching against using the wording in the rulebook.
There is often ambiguity within the rules. The specific one in this game was specifically about delivery rules on pharmaceuticals and the points for the Trade Department.
Here is the particular problem as I work very hard to defend my ruling judgment, the Trade department wording is (and this is taken directly from the rulebook) “Each employee in the Trade Department is worth 1, 2, or 3 points for each different country that you have delivered at least one good.” Now the rule for delivering pharmaceuticals that is relevant is provided next “If you are the first player to deliver Pharmaceuticals to a country, place a Delivery token over the country’s Pharmaceutical bonus icon, and immediately earn the corresponding bonus action.” From those two sentences, it is obvious that a delivery of Pharmaceuticals to a country would be sufficient to fulfill the Trade Department requirement of “at least one good” and thus you would score points for it, but guess what? YOU DON’T! It’s even confirmed by the designer in a BGG thread. The issue comes in the Trade department wording. The wording should read: “Each employee in the Trade Department is worth 1, 2, or 3 points for each different country on your Delivery Board marked with at least 1 Delivery token.” Yes a little wordier but also in the middle of the game and working with only the rulebook I rule (as Game Daddy) that delivering Pharmaceuticals to a country counts as delivering at least one good to that country and therefore gives you extra points in the Trade Department. A mistake I made caused one player to erroneously win. I’ve done worse…though the second topic of this conversation is why I’m really writing this post.
Sometimes People just don’t get rules
Man, I really don’t like throwing my players under the bus but I really don’t know what to do about this. Some games have relatively involved and somewhat complex rules, we call these medium-heavy to heavy board games. I have one player who I have had a similar pattern pop up repeatedly and sometimes I catch it and sometimes it slips past me causing them to have a sour experience of the game. The situation goes as this:
- I am explaining a complex game. The explanation is going into the 20-30 minute mark (which we all expect) and there are some questions. Some things are not 100% clear to this individual but they decide that they rather just get the game started so they don’t ask. They do make it somewhat clear that they don’t fully understand the specific rule but they think they understand it well enough.
- Eventually near the end of the game (and this can be 1-2 hours later as the game is continuing) this player makes some assumptions, often incorrect about the rule for this specific mechanism and hinge some amount of end-game strategy to this incorrect ruling.
- When this scoring comes to pass and I explain that the ruling is incorrect they get visibly upset (without causing any kind of scene) about not understanding this in the first place and I believe this ruins their experience of the game.
This pattern repeated itself in Autobahn specifically with the route cards (which I will be the first to admit is kind of convoluted in the game). What makes it even harder for me is that I tried to be very explicit in showing how route cards were resolving after Era 1 and Era 2 of the game, however since this player had not actually completed their route at this point they were not interested in refreshing their knowledge of the rule which they later hinged a large number of points about getting their route card to be worth 0, which they did incorrectly and missed out on a second promotion costing them about 10 points and the win.
On one hand, I do feel bad that this happened on the other hand I genuinely felt like I went over the rule and went over it again several times during the game. The other players seemed to have a decent understanding of the specific rule in question and in more than one case asked about it to make sure that they were calculating it correctly, so this feels like it is one player. I usually try to catch when this happens and go out of my way to reexplain the rule but I sometimes miss it, and then I feel bad. I guess this is just a cry for help for someone to tell me I shouldn’t feel bad? Might happen when someone actually reads this…
Game Daddy Out!