this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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As someone who loves board games, I don't really understand why there are so many people that are "afraid" of learning new games. In most situations, it's not that painful to learn a new game! And the process can be totally worth it!
One friend sort of explained it to me. It's anxiety. They were afraid they weren't learning fast enough, or were playing badly, or other people were judging them. Fear shuts down the brain. You're explaining to them, "You can take three actions on your turn" but they're not hearing you - they only hear anxiety-fear-screams
Every time this happens, it's worse the next time. It's one more example of "humiliation" on the stack. Even if no one else thought there was anything amiss.
I prefer to read the rules in my own time. Link me the PDF in advance and we are golden.
I'm mostly the same.
I often think about one time a friend invited me to play "DND". I get there and it's revealed it's not DND, but a different RPG. I was like "ok hold on..." and spent like 20 minutes skimming the book while we all ate pizza and settled down.
By the time we started I knew the rules as well as everyone else, which was admittedly a low bar.
The authors are (typically) trying to write the rules in a way for you to understand. It's not a puzzle.
Of course, being familiar with the genre helps immensely.
Ah but consider... It's a game you know, all your friends are there, and the rules are being explained very, very badly. And you're not allowed to say anything because everyone at the table glares at you if you try to interrupt.
Satan is now six minutes deep into explaining how the corn exchange phase works, but he's not even told anyone what the objective is, the basic actions, the flow of play or anything else. He's also gotten half the rules wrong and keeps contradicting himself. Everyone's eyes are glazing over. The corn exchange phase isn't even used unless a particular faction is in play...
tbh I'd still interrupt the crap out of Satan, ignoring the glares, to ask a bunch of questions until I would feel somewhat confident that I sort of understand the rules. I know, I'd be super annoying. Or I would give up and say "shut up and let's start playing".
Supernatural punishment rules my friend. You can't interrupt, you're here for eternal damnation. Every time you do, the time loop resets, and you have to listen to the whole boring, painful, terrible rules explanation from the start.
And, obviously, it's your favorite game. You know everyone here would love it if you could just teach it properly. But you can't...
I'm the resident rules master in my group, so it's usually on me to teach. It's usually not that bad, but for complicated games I need to prep and make sure I have the rules down pretty well and know how a turn works beforehand, otherwise it can be a disaster.
Woah, great job!
It's just really boring, at least if you have adhd
Fair. In that case, if I were to teach you a board game, I'd just quickly say the game's goal and immediately start a trial run of the game, and only explain rules when I deemed them relevant, or when someone would ask something.
For more complex games, I've also made people play "simplified" versions of the game, and adding rules of the game to the mix whenever I saw that people were getting more comfortable with the game (for example, that's imo that's the best way to teach Mahjong).
I can imagine that could also be annoying to many people, not knowing how to fully play a game while playing it. But I think it's WAY better than something like people listening to every rule of the game for 20 minutes, without them interacting with the game. If I did that, they wouldn't even remember all the rules whenever they would start playing, so I don't think the explanations would be that useful at all... @~@ I also can imagine lots of people who like board games either being unable or not wanting to take the same approaches as I do with teaching board games.