What to Do If... You Don't Remember (or Fully Understand) the Rules

Imagine that it's game night at your home. You've invited four of your best game buddies to join you in learning a somewhat complicated game like Power Grid. All of your buddies have some experience with board games and even own some of their own, so you anticipate a not-so-steep learning curve. With this in mind, you spent a little time reading the rules, skimming sections because you have to commit time to actually cleaning your living room and bathroom (personal note: please clean your bathrooms before game day; your guests will quietly thank you for it).

Anyway, your guests arrive. Wisely, you already had the board and components laid out on the table and the rules ready for easy reference. After a few appetizers and drinks, you invite your friends to sit as you explain the rules. At first, people are comprehending and nodding their understanding. Yet, partway through the explanation, you stumble. What was that rule about cycling in new power plants? Is it last-to-first place turn order during bidding or during the connection of cities? As you feverishly rifle through the rulebook, you lose your place and your guests' collective attentions begin to wander. You spend five minutes reading through each phase of the game until you think you have a firm grasp of the game flow, which prompts you to restart your explanation... until you realize that you didn't quite understand the flow after all. After that, it's all sweaty palms, reading, and your guests turning on the TV to watch reruns of Last Man Standing...

This scenario is not a strange one. I would wager that almost all of you have experienced this when teaching a game you own. Getting stuck on misunderstood or forgotten rules, befuddling yourself on why certain game events happen, and even forgetting basic setup are not uncommon during the teaching of games. However, in this article, I want to focus on an aspect of rules that has needlessly stymied many a game session: not knowing certain rules OR forgetting rules. Here are a few tips and tricks I have for what to do if you don't remember (or understand) rules. These tips are not in any particular order:

Read the Rules Well Before Game Day
The obvious solution for not remembering rules is to read the rules long before you have your game day. I would suggest both reading the rules and playing a mock game on your own to acquaint yourself with the machinery of the game itself. For note-taking, you may want to print a separate copy of the rules that you can highlight and notate. Of course, if you don't mind marking up your rulebook, feel free to do so.

Read Forums and User Comments
Board Game Geek is a great online resource for acquiring more information about rules and frequently-asked questions. Read the comments pertaining to the game in question; I would even recommend bookmarking the URL for that game and having that handy before the event you are hosting, but a better solution would be to compile handy knowledge in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

Now, if you didn't do your homework and study the rules, then here are the tips for you:

Wing It (and Tell People You're Winging It)
When teaching a game, the worst thing, besides not knowing a rule, is taking an inordinate amount of time reading the rules while your friends languish in their semi-comfortable dining room chairs. I recommend skimming the rules, and then informing your guests that you are just going to start the game and proceed with your tenuous grasp of the rules. Tell your friends that you may make mistakes during the course of play, but you will adhere to the rules as you understood them at the start. Then, after the game is over, let people know what your mistakes were and how the game should be played. This sounds sloppy, but playing a game incorrectly and having fun is more important than getting mired in rules reading for an hour before you start the game.

Ignore Certain Rules
It is perfectly acceptable to excise rules from the game for the sake of starting the game and enjoying each other's company. For instance, some people play Carcassonne for the first time WITHOUT farmer scoring. Sure, this takes away a key part of the scoring process, but at least you introduce your friends to the concept of tile-laying and feature scoring. If you finish fast enough (note: Carcassonne games can take only 75 minutes if you play with the base set), then you can incorporate that rule you ignored.

Set House Rules
A variation of winging it is telling people that you are going to run a game with a certain interpretation in mind, which is basically setting house rules. For the sake of learning and starting a game, there is nothing wrong with this as long as people are made aware of it. Yet, if you set house rules on the fly while someone decides to read the rules during gameplay, he may feel cheated if he discovers that the rules state something different from your house rule.

In general, if you don't understand a rule in the moment, especially if you're reading and teaching at the same time, tell everything that you are going to proceed with a certain approach and ask for their consent. Be flexible, though: some people may disagree with your house rule, which is actually a great thing because they are now engaged in the learning process and may help you better execute that particular stipulation.

Play a Few Practice Turns and Reset
If you have several hours scheduled, you could play two or three demo rounds of a game for people to get a feel for the game while you work out your comprehension of the game. After you've identified pain points in the rules and negotiated with others to lay out how the game should be played, take a break, reset the board, and play the "real" session.

Learn Together
If you have a patient group of close friends, you may want to entreat them to read the rules with you and learn the game together. To do this, I recommend sending the rules to each of them by email or even message service, and then going through the rules in unison. With the right group, this learning session becomes a hangout in and of itself, especially for really involved and complex games. Some people relish these opportunities: if you identify these folks, hold on to their friendship with both hands!

(For Experts Only) Make Up the Rules!
Now, there comes a time when, despite your improvisational abilities, you cannot make out enough of the game's rules in the moment to develop a working understanding of the game that you can even communicate to your friends. It happens; you are not alone in these moments of confusion. Considering this, based on your experience with games, make up the rules!

An example of this was the first time I played Robinson Crusoe. In retrospect, Robinson Crusoe is not that complicated, but the rules are not the most clearly-written rules and do leave new players to a boatload of reading during gameplay, so I remember having to make up a rule about the in-game items that you can construct in which each item, unless explicitly stated, could be used over and over. For some reason, I was confused about whether items were used one time or able to be used repeatedly, so I just made up a rule. Indeed, you may end up perpetuating incorrect play, but remember: your goal is to guide your friends through a game by playing it and having fun. Do not get mired in reading and waiting.

Before I proceed, I should note that you must let people know that you are making up the rules because you do not want to perpetuate incorrect play. Doing so is like spreading a disease: you not only affect your friends, but they affect their friends. Even worse, once your friends discover your malfeasance, they will NOT trust you to teach another board game, so give your friends fair warning. Funnily enough, some of your friends may object to your making up rules and help you out by reading the rules for themselves.

When All Else Fails... Fall Back!
If you are not an expert on ad hoc rule generation or with tap-dancing through a rules explanation, you may want to declare that you need more time to learn the game and move on to a game that most of your friends know. Sure, you may have a friend or two that would be disappointed in not learning the new game, but sometimes simply playing any game is the best course of action.

Thanks to my direct influence, my two teenage sons own and play board games. My older son, who is 15, is less interested in board games than at least seven other interests, but he does play games to get out of doing homework and as a general diversion. As it does happen, he has moved beyond board games as a personal preference. Not so conversely, my younger son, who is 13, still likes receiving games as gifts and will opt on his own to play them with little prompting. I mention both of my sons because, despite their being at different points of what I call the "board game interest lifecycle," they have one thing in common: they both dislike teaching people board games because there is a lot of pressure to know and understand (almost) every rule. Thankfully, though, with the tips and experience I've shared, you can spend less time stressing out about rules explanations and more time enjoying your friends' company and, oh yes, playing the game you wanted to play. Your friends might even appreciate the game enough to read the rules, yell at you for the mistakes you made, and then demand that the game be played correctly next week. To me, in this case, everyone wins!

Rules Discussion: Sanctioned Cheating

I haven't written anything for Rules Discussion in a while, but I do have a topic today: sanctioned cheating, which is the concept (not necessarily a mechanic) of being allowed to "cheat" within the rules of a game. I'm not talking about deception of an opponent with misdirection or baiting tactics that prevail in miniature and/or war games; to convince your opponent that you're attacking one region when you're actually targeting another region on the board is endemic to such games. I'm also not talking about using distraction or "table talk" to fluster or confuse an opponent, though some may consider this "cheating." Instead, I'm discussing the concept of breaking or bending rules in a game as being encouraged by the rules of the game itself.

One form of sanctioned cheating is outright lying, which happens rampantly in Sheriff of Nottingham (in which you are encouraged to deceive the Sheriff to smuggle contraband into Nottingham) and the classic Balderdash (in which you try to convince others that your false definition for a word is the "real" one). I'm very much on the fence about this topic because encouraging one's children to lie (even in a game) may send a conflicting message. Lying can happen to humorous effect, and the rules allows for it in these games, so it is actually "wrong" to do it? Hmm... As a Christian, I am truly conflicted by this idea, yet games like these can be fun if it is understood that lying is only "acceptable" when sanctioned by the rules... That's really confusing!

Another form of sanctioned cheating is the one on which I'm focusing: rules that allow you to break the rules, which is complicated, so I'll focus on one game to explain: Cheating Moth, or Mogel Motte in German. This game involves a simple objective of ridding yourself of cards to win. Each player starts with a hand of eight cards. Depending on the face-up card in the discard pile, each player places the appropriate card on top of the discard pile. For example, if there is a "1" card on the pile, you can place a "5" or a "2." There are several cards that incur special conditions, such as a "mosquito" card which requires all players but the active player to slap their hands on it; the last player to do so receives one card from each player's hand. Anyway, there isn't much to say about the hand evacuation aspect of this game... except that the rules allow players to not only rid themselves of cards in the conventional way, but also in any other way they see fit! This could involve, say, dropping one card at a time on the floor, or placing them up a sleeve, or playing each card on the discard pile out of turn, all the while convincing the other players that it's one's turn.

Of course, this sounds like anarchy, but there's yet another catch: at the start of each game, one player is the "Guard Bug," whose job is to catch cheaters. For instance, if someone drops a card on the floor and the Guard Bug sees the act happen, he or she calls out the cheater, who must then receive one card from each of his or her opponents. Then, that cheater becomes the Guard Bug. The Guard Bug is the only player in Cheating Moth who cannot "cheat," which is a huge burden because he or she has to rid themselves of cards the conventional way AND keep a wary eye on all the players to not only stem the tide of cheating, but also to get rid of the Guard Bug title for themselves!

Sanctioned cheating is a dynamic that doesn't necessarily interest me as a gamer, but it's an intriguing, also mind-bending paradigm to consider. In the case of Cheating Moth, the "cheating" is sanctioned in that you have a game "layer" in which there is a basic mechanic for getting rid of cards, and then there is a kind of social layer on the game layer that allows you to circumvent the rules in the game layer. This is when sanctioned cheating works in a game: if there is an elementary game mechanic and victory conditions in place, the rules can allow for a subset of stacked rules that let players get around the game mechanic. For games with simple objectives and rules, it would be easy to place a cheating social layer on the game. However, for complex games like Twilight Struggle or Agricola, cheating would confuse everyone and throw the game into chaos; can you imagine if players could steal sheep from the central area, or even the "bank?"

In order for sanctioned cheating to work, I believe you have to have a strong and direct core of simple rules and victory conditions. If goals and rules are complex, cheating actually works toward undermining the entire game, but with Cheating Moth, you have an easy goal (i.e. get rid of cards) which is dull if played in that way, but the cheating layer (and the "Guard Bug role) adds another layer to the game that doesn't undermine the rule layer. Sanctioned cheating is a difficult topic to broach because one may have strong convictions against cheating, and yet there may be a social layer that allows for cheating in a game. To be honest, this is not really my cup of tea, and yet Cheating Moth is quite fun because you are required to be creative with how you remove cards from your hand.

What are your thoughts?