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!
