This started as a reply to a Google+ thread started by Rob Donoghue, but got longish, so I am moving it here.
The thread is about “which 5 boardgames make up Boardgames 101?” which is a great question. Rob clarifies with “I’m looking for games that you could give to someone and they could reasonably learn to play and enjoy without needing to be taught and without intimidating potential players with apparent complexity. Ideally, I would also like these to be games which could serve as a gateway to other, more complicated games down the line.”
The key thing here (to my mind) is the “without needing to be taught” aspect. These need to be games that people who don’t play games can figure out how to play. To that end, they need to have:
- A game concept that is accessible
- A goal and fundamental strategy that can be expressed in one or two sentences
- Rules which are simple to read
- Rules which are easy to retain in your head, without tricky sequencing or interactions
- Minimum interaction of other players’ state with your decisions
This is all about minimizing cognitive load – the more mental energy people have to spend thinking about how to play the game, the less mental energy they have to spend on actually playing it, and enjoying the experience of playing it. This is not to say that some people don’t get a lot of enjoyment of thinking about rules interactions – I certainly do – but that those people aren’t the ones we are talking about. The people who like thinking about rules are probably already playing boardgames.
Reading through the 175+ responses to that post, I was struck by the number of people suggesting games that are considered classic, essential games, but that are not very accessible. These are games that are used to introduce non-gamers to boardgames *by gamers* – that is, when we get the chance to show someone a game, we use these. Games like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Munchkin, Pandemic and Small World. These are great games, which are lots of fun to play. But I don’t think they’re good games for non-gamers to use to introduce themselves to gaming.
Settlers of Catan has resource gathering, trading and building, with multiple ways to score points. It’s a lot to keep track of, which is part of what makes it a great game, but it’s not something I would give to someone to figure out on their own.
Ticket to Ride has an easily accessible theme (building railroads and carrying passengers), but the complexity of color-specific rail segments and route planning, along with the strategic choice involved in taking or not taking additional route cards, makes it less accessible.
Carcassonne‘s mix of building the map and placing meeples, along with the constantly evolving scoring picture based on the evolving map and the placement of your own and others’ meeples, makes it a hard game to learn on your own.
Munchkin is a simple basic rule set, but the sensibility of the game is tied to the shared experience of D&D that a novice gamer probably doesn’t have. The in-jokes stop being in-jokes and just get confusing. Munchkin also has the potential for you to screw yourself on your own turn with a bad draw, which is funny but not fun for the beginning gamer.
Pandemic is on the edge – the rules are simple and the players work together, which reduces the individual cognitive load, and while each player has a special power, they’re pretty easy to grasp. But the sheer number of things to keep track of and do in each players’ turn makes this one more complex than I would recommend for the novice.
Small World has a really simple ruleset, but each race/power combination breaks it in some way. It also has terrain types, strategic decisions about going into decline, and some unbalanced combinations. And the setting relies heavily on fantasy tropes, which may not appeal to the non-gamer we’re trying to get to.
So I wouldn’t recommend any of those – what would I recommend? Based on my own recent experiences with introducing non-gamers to boardgames, these are the games I take along when I’m going to visit my mom or my in-laws.
Trans America is a dead simple eurostyle rail game, kind of like Ticket to Ride but simpler. Which doesn’t mean that there’s not strategic depth, but does mean that it’s very accessible. My daughter was playing it with us at age 10 and teaching it to her friends at 11. Like TtR, you have a set of destinations. Unlike TtR, your rail placement per turn is fixed, you only have one set of destinations, and you can use other people’s rails to connect your destinations. It’s great for kids, and for adults. Especially if the adults are drinking.
Flapjacks and Sasquatches is a simple-but-fun game of competitive lumberjacking, with a silly sensibility. Like Munchkin, it’s a card game, but unlike Munchkin, the setting is pretty much universally accessible (at least in US audiences), the interactions with other players are fewer, and there’s really no way to screw yourself (although you can spend way too long waiting for an axe if you get bad draws).
Zombie Dice is fast, easy and fun. The rules are simple, it has a lot of chance and thus replayability, and games are over quickly. It helps a lot if you give people a set of brain tokens (we use brain-shaped pencil-top erasers).
Rather than Pandemic, I’d suggest Forbidden Island. It has all the strengths of Pandemic without the complexity or serious theme.
Fluxx is a game that non-gamers aisle pick up and enjoy, in my experience. The increasing complexity is zany, enjoyable, and a great trainer for thinking about more complex rule systems.
This is a good challenge. I’ll be back if I think of more!
I would like to emphasize how critical the concept of ‘cognitive load’ is: if the rules take 15 minutes (or longer) to read aloud /before you’re allowed to play/, or if you’re teaching the game and you see their attention wandering/eyes glazing, or if you have to use your “authority” as the teacher to shut people up because they’re not remaining obediently silent while you read the rules cover to cover…you’ve already turned them off to the game. Their /first impression/ may already be, ‘this is not a fun game’. They don’t know why the enduring a monologue now will make it fun later. Or, by the time you get to exception number 7, they’ve forgotten 1-6. It’s too much.
I’m not a gamer. My husband is. Show me a game I can jump into and learn while playing, and I might play. Treat me to an authoritarian rules recital, and I’ll go clean the kitchen instead. I think lots of potential game-players are like that. What games can be learned while playing, jumped into with both feet?
Angela, I’m Kevin’s wife, and a non-gamer. That’s one of the reasons he picked these, these are the games I’ll play.
I like other games – Arabian Nights is a hoot – like a choose your own adventure – and the rules are simple enough. I like Pandemic, but I like the cooperative aspect – I think you need a native guide to play it the first time. I like Munchkin, but I’m enough of a geek to get the in jokes.
I’m someone who has never gotten cribbage. The “how many ways can you count to 15 thing” is beyond me – and I’m a pretty intelligent person.
I do like D&D the way we play it, which involves a lot of beer and no real adherence to any complicated rules – its down to “did you hit” and “what damage did you do.” Add in Whimsy Cards and its really enjoyable.
I’m uncertain “cognitive load” is a useful concept here. If you are strict about it, then Slap Jack is a mininmum cognitive load (MCL) game. So are Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. Possibly Go Fish. Tic-tac-toe. But these are not games we enjoy as adults. In addition, the rules to Go are MCL, but play is quite challenging. So MCL is of questionable value here.
I will propose that rules with branches (B) are the challenge. I’m distinguishing “complicated” from “extensive” here, where something extensive is a composed from lots of simple steps; and complicated is exemplified by Fizbin (the relations between the steps and between the rules is obscure at best).
Using this, the front end of Monopoly has low B–you go around the board buying properties, collecting rents, making special moves as directed by special squares and special cards. Low branching. But once you get to owning a monopoly, rents double, houses must be built evenly, a hotel is five houses; mortgaging-unmortgaging, selling houses back to the bank, special assessments…High B. I’ll put Settlers in the same category–collecting and building is easy, but translating that into a win is hard.
Chess–high B. Checkers, not so much. So little, in fact, that the game was conquered in the late 19th century. (Read the history of tournament play–kind of interesting.) D&D is high B, but that B is highly similar to the kinds of decisions you make in real life, so there’s a base competence available for D&D. Compare: we often don’t like players who play the rules, like a player who carries a ranseur because it’s +5 to disarm. Those are funny, non-daily-life decisions that remind you you are playing a game.
Now we have something else to look at–transferring competence between domains (TC). CHess, not so much. Faces is good for this, and play is just, like, your opinion, man; thus, like daily life. Monopoly has trading, paying for things, etc; but the other stuff (second list above) has arbitrary things in it (complications) and doesn’t have domain comparability with daily life (low TC).
Comparing Tic-Tac-Toe with Mancala, you can see neither of them has TC, but TTT has low branching and Mancala does not. Mancala is, therefore, “more abstract”, but it doesn’t go on so long that it becomes stressful. And like TTT, there’s a sure-fire strategy for winning or stalemating. Once that’s figured out, the games are for kids.
SPI games seem highest on B and lowest on TC. Few of the games are genuinely hard, but you really must be willing to spend a lot of time following the branches. Nuclear War is like monopoly–base play is draw-turn-play (low B), but the results can be high B.
Just off the cuff, FWIW.
cjs
PS Chutes and Ladders is greatly improved if you play it from the top down because the game can never end; thus, it’s the adult version.
Clarke:
I agree with you in general, but in the case I’m talking about here, we’re specifically looking past the games-everybody-knows set to try to find games that could be used to bridge someone into
“modern” games.
I like the idea of distinguishing the components that make up the cognitive load – amount of branching in the rules is one, ability to transfer competence is another.
A third dimension is the need to maintain state, as in Dominion, where remembering the cards you have previously selected is a key part of your decisions when acquiring new cards. Games where a portion of your state (e.g., your deck) is hidden from you are great for gamers, not so much for novices.
Another dimension is the requirement to predict outcomes across multiple turns, as with games where the scoring comes at the end (Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride), or where your future options will be constrained by the actions of other players in response to your actions (chess being the king of this).