You know what is always a little weird? First plays. Now I am going to look at this from the perspective of someone who has to not just know the game well enough to teach it and play it, they also have to be able to act as game police through most of the first game. You know the person who sits around and makes sure that no one is breaking any rules during their turn, rather than planning their next turn or working on their strategy. We usually have a jjoke that anyone who wins their first game when they are teaching is ultimately a “bad teacher” as they spent too much time on their own game and not the game as a whole (This is a reminder that eventually I need to write that article about being a good game host).
Now you know what makes first plays even weirder? When they are for a deep game…What do I mean by “deep” This is where i have to separate a heavy game from a deep one. A complex or heavy game often have a lot of systems, or in some cases a few systems but a lot of rules that cover them. They require you to remember how all these systems work and keep it all in order to play the game, there may be specific placement rules and requirements for a barn but if you wanted to put up a field instead of a barn then, oh boy, you have a whole other set of requirements and procedures to set it up that if you are lucky overlap in one or two steps (I am looking at you Lacerta!). This type of game gains complexity from the opaqueness of the rules and the fact that it takes quite some time to get your head around everything. Now a deep game on the other hand offers relatively simple rules and systems but then forces you to figure out what is their worth.
One such game (that actually caused this post in the first place) is Indonesia by Splotter Games. Overall many of the choices are not overly difficult to internalize. You bid for turn order, in a simple one time around open bidding system. You choose which upgrade to take during the R&D phase. You can choose to merge companies together and you can choose how much to bid on said companies. The most complex of phases is usually the operations phase, but even then the decision space is usually quite small, when you choose to operate a company you have to deliver as much as you can in a very specific manner. You can generally puzzle out or even have other players point out what is the optimal way to do this with very few actual choices within the process. So where is the complexity? Choosing whether you want to go first or last or third is a very important choice, particularly when looking to see what others may take as their upgrades in R&D. It is even more important in the operations phase where figuring out who should operate first is a very interesting problem. Do you delay operating hoping that the shipping companies expand so that you can deliver more? Do you choose to go early so that you can fill up all the cities full of a resource before the other large companies can operate? Do you prioritize delivering to a single city to make it grow or do you try to spread out your goods? What is the value to you and to other players in the future rounds of doing all of these things? There is no easy answer to these questions. Often there isn’t even difficult answers to these questions and they can compound quickly.
That’s not what we were talking about though….We’re talking about first games as a general idea. So during this first game of Indonesia many of us went Ham. We made choices that were not optimal because we didn’t fully understand the levers we were pulling but oh boy did we want to pull them! So one of us ended up in an interesting position by the end of the game of having expansion 4 and led to some ridiculous plays like delivering one good and then merging his company the next turn with a significantly smaller company to basically either extract a large amount of money from other players or to pay very little to expand his own company. Now this player didn’t end up winning but it was really interesting to look and see that this was even a possibility since the rest of us weren’t really considering it. I specifically took mergers 3 near the end just to see what it looked like when someone started merging giant companies. It probably pushed me from fourth place to 2nd in the end but it wasn’t done strategically it was done because I don’t think any of us quite understood what COULD be done with the higher level merging power. We had a hypothetical idea of what was possible but it actually needed to be tested and converged upon by actually forcing to make it happen. Ultimately this led to a fun tense game where we weren’t necessarily fully understanding the effects of our actions but we were sure pushing forward with some kind of agenda.
Ultimately that is really what needs to happen in a “first” game. The players understand that there are all these awesome fun levers they can pull. In a standard game this may be…mostly obvious. For example let us take a basic worker placement game like Lords of Waterdeep. You mostly use your workers to get some resources or to acquire some quests and then you get to use those resources to complete the quest. Nothing too complex. If you want to make it a bit more complex you have something like Hansa Teutonica where you quickly figure out in your first play that it is VERY advantageous to just get in everyone else’s way. But then there are still some levers, that are less obvious. Which upgrade is worth getting and when? the Third action seems quite important, but how important is it to get the fourth or fifth? As opposed to the book skill or the bag skill to be able to pull more workers into the proper piles. There is no obvious answer here and the fun of the first game is just messing to figure it out. And then, you have your truly complex games, your Lacerda’s, your Splotters. Where the question becomes, OK I know actions I can do, but how do I literally achieve anything in this board game? Those are where the first game truly shines in wackiness and everyone must truly be encouraged to go as off the wall as possible. Because the worst thing that someone can do in one of these first games is try to play conservative, because you just don’t know what is safe or what is not. Nothing feels worse than not being able to do anything in a game, it can sour your whole experience of, even a magnificent, game. The right attitude can make all the difference in your “first” game especially as they get heavier.
Then again sometimes the games are just too restrictive. You have complex actions and obtuse systems and are required to do a specific set of actions A->B->C->D to achieve anything, and there is no leeway in this. Not every complex game is genius, and not every simple game is boring. But, you always have to put your best foot forward as a player, especially for the first game.