Fantasy in board games 2: A spoonful of sugar
It is crucial to a game’s success that players can understand how to play, can get into the game quickly, else they may get frustrated by it before they even begin.They need to understand the rules very early on.Short rules help, well-written rules certainly help, easing them in with gradually-added complexity and characters explaining them with entertaining voices all help, but to make a complex game playable, wouldn't it be good if your players already knew them before they sat down at your table?You want to place as little mental load on your players as possible. You can make use of your players’ already-existing set of rules in their head to ease them into understanding yours. You want to tap into their knowledge.Setting can do that. Fantasy can. Like the candy man. He can.Here’s an example:You explain some rules: the red block can move sideways, the white one backwards, the green one can attack in all directions and the blue one can move forward two and attack left or right one space.That’s four bits plus four movement rules = eight things to remember with no relation between them. Good luck trying to make them learn or enjoy the game after that! They’ll spend most of the time fighting with the interface instead of getting to those plot points and/or fighting with each other.But introduce these rules congruent with the setting – red crabs move sideways, white squids backwards, green octopi in all directions and blue sharks left or right, or forward fast. They know these rules already – just tap into them and it will reduce their mental load into just one file: “Sea creatures acting like they should”.Sure, you might THINK that your rules are easy to learn – that they are natural with a slight learning curve, but in your own mind, this information has already been chunked through months of studying the rules, and your chief playtesters are there as well. In that time, you have all gotten it down to one mental chunk. It is natural to forget that others don’t know what you know. You had months. Your players have five minutes. It needs to be pre-digested with a setting they know already.Another writer (let me know who you are) described this as the “Of course!” method. Like “Of course planes can’t move backwards!”
It seems obvious, and it should. Find a setting and a fantasy for the rule and don’t waste game time getting your players to reinvent the squid.