I’ve not had a great couple of weeks. I have been trying to plan out some gaming time but both general sickness and some mental blocks have been stopping me from doing this. At the same time I did have an opportunity to introduce my most consistent gaming group to a game that I kind of acquired, selected and curated just for them and… it just didn’t work out.
The lead-up
I take my job as Game Daddy pretty seriously. I know for a fact that if I don’t put in the work, if I don’t gather the people, learn the rules, present and teach the game then I won’t get people to come back and play a second time or perhaps ever. More so if I want a game to be played again I need to make sure that it is presented in a way that people enjoy. Because even if I think a game is up a specific persons alley if they disagree then it doesn’t end up working out.
With this is in mind, I am often on the lookout for more games that fit a subset of my groups dynamics. For example we have a group of three that does well with co-op games. We have played through many games of The Crew, or Hanabi. We specifically enjoy low communication card games and that seems to work for us as we have known each other for many years and are usually quite in sync of how we consider a lot of strategies so often with very little communication we can get on the same level. Well when Eternal Decks made it past my view point I figured that this was a game that would jive real well with us and decided to pick up a french copy (easily available in my country) and download the English rule book (not my first time doing so) and try it out.
The Execution
The best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy. Though I think that may not be the best metaphor in this situation since the “enemy” is my good friends and we are playing a co-op game…so…you know I could have probably picked something better. I can blame a bunch of things here. New games require not just a social load to people who want to play games with and hang out with but also a mental load. This may be surprising to a lot of boardgamers, but the biggest “barrier to entry” that I find with a lot of people is that they are not always down to learn a bunch of new rules for a game. So I had decided to look a bit into the game teaching experience and continually read that people found the “intro scenario” (Stage A – Beginner) as too easy and that the game kind of played itself. Many therefore recommended starting one level up from there at Stage A – Standard mode. I took this advice and after we explained the game and started the game went quickly from us moving forward to everyone desperately and always needing cards. Multiple times when one or more players would be continually stuck with the ability to play nothing and do nothing useful other than discard and slowly move us towards a loss condition.
Now I should note I am all for the struggle bus and getting my ass kicked on the first attempt of a co-op game, but maybe my group wasn’t as eager about it this time. They felt that the game intentionally hamstrung them and they didn’t feel like it was really anything they could do differently. Whether or not this is true would probably be argued by better players online. I guess the better option would have been to take the easiest first scenario not so much to challenge us, but rather to learn the pitfalls that we need to avoid since it wasn’t as obvious while playing in the middle of a game. We did kind of learn one pitfall by the end. While it seems very tantalizing to go for the “easy” gems that require only two cards early in the game it is kind of a trap as you are later stuck trying to pull of difficult recipes when your hand is a lot more constrained. We still managed to pull out two out of four gems to win and were decently close to getting a third. I had a great time with the experience but I could see that my team mates did not feel quite the same way. As Game Daddy rules dictate the most important thing is to get people to play again with me so maybe this ended up souring my experience and lowering my energy.
The Fallout (or Lessons Learned)
I mean the rest of the evening was fine, we took on a bit of lighter games after this play and everyone overall enjoyed themselves. That being said you can always learn more from experiences so lets list think about what we could have done differently:
- Just start at the basic level… always! I mean I really should have learned this from how much I play Guards of Atlantis II. The “basic” is there for a reason. Sure people online are going to call the “basic” mode easy. Especially when the game is not readily available to the mass market and the people that own it are more often than not heavy enthusiasts of board games and play their one Lacerda a month. I get it. Sometimes just playing the basic games to learn the ins and outs of the system is interesting. Especially if you know how it can get more difficult. The worst case scenario is that people say “OH THAT WAS SO EASY” and you can explain to them how game difficulty ramps up or what other scenarios exists (B-F in this case).
- Always make sure the mental capacity is there. This is generally something I am pretty good at, but sometimes my excitement gets the better of me and I just force forward with “whatever I feel like playing.” This one has kind of been wearing down on me. A lot of the people I play with (barring a few rare meetups) is people who are not always identify as board gamers. Just friends who play board games. It is harder to get them to devote the mental capacity to learn and enjoy new games, especially many new games. Double this with the fact that it isn’t exactly easy not to be stressed with many other things in life right now (and that everyone has their own things going on, like work, additional higher learning etc.) There is a lot of argument for either looking elsewhere to get some of these bigger games played, or maybe give a lot of lead up time and make people excited to try something.
- Bounce back better. This is personally my own problem. I have a hard time separating plays with peoples enjoyment. If I have a game that bombs I always feel like I have bombed the whole board game evening and it is harder for me to bounce back from that. I think I need to recognize that it is possible to reset and have people go back to having fun with some games. The entertaining thing is I don’t usually care about “meta” progression of games where someone screwed me over in one game and I have to get them back the next, but for some reason this one stings….maybe its because we all fear failure and the failure state of a board game day/evening is pretty harsh on someone who wants everyone to have a good fun time. Ultimately this will probably make the games more enjoyable for everyone else because no one wants a host who is bummed out, it becomes contagious and affects others in the group.
Well the lessons are hopefully learned and hopefully more gaming picks up soon……