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I never got what people like about board games. Studying a manual for hours in order to play a game isn't fun to me but people are wired differently

by siva7 2y ago

zahlman 2y ago
The point of the article is to explore ways to make it possible to play the game without studying a manual for hours first.
jordanwallwork 2y ago
For most games you _don't_ study a manual for hours. Of course there are some crazy epic games for really hardcore gamers, but rule books for mid-weight game tend to take 5-15 minutes to read through and then you're ready to play, and a lot of people enjoy that time - familiarising yourself with something new, trying to understand what makes it tick. I personally find it an enjoyable ritual. Depending on the quality of the rules / complexity of the game, the first play through might be a bit ropey, but it's usually fine, and after that you're left with something that you can get hours and hours of fun from. Board games are awesome
Jensson 2y ago
You have to learn the rules of every game you play, every board game rules are simple enough that you can learn them just by reading, the same can not be said for computer games whose rules often are hard to grasp even after hundreds of hours of having played them. So if you like knowing how the game you play works then board games is such a breath of fresh air compared to computer games where so many mechanics are black boxes that you have to reverse engineer to figure out what they do because they aren't described anywhere. Like, exactly how does armor reduce damage? How do defense affect chance to get hit? When does this conditional effect apply? All such things are often very opaque etc in computer games, since they don't have to describe them to you to make the game playable, and that makes it extremely frustrating to try to learn the game, you can play the game but you can't make any decisions since you don't know what anything does. Even worse, computer game tooltips and manuals often lie to you, giving you the wrong numbers or describe it in a different way than it was coded so it doesn't do what it says it does. A very common example is percentages, what is 150% damage bonus? Sometimes it adds 50% damage, sometimes it adds 150% damage, you never really know and sometimes the same game uses both versions. That never happens in board games since the written text is the implementation.

I never got what people like about board games. Studying a manual for hours in order to play a game isn't fun to me but people are wired differently

by siva7 2y ago

I never got what people like about board games. Studying a manual for hours in order to play a game isn't fun to me but people are wired differently

zahlman 2y ago

The point of the article is to explore ways to make it possible to play the game without studying a manual for hours first.

jordanwallwork 2y ago

For most games you _don't_ study a manual for hours. Of course there are some crazy epic games for really hardcore gamers, but rule books for mid-weight game tend to take 5-15 minutes to read through and then you're ready to play, and a lot of people enjoy that time - familiarising yourself with something new, trying to understand what makes it tick. I personally find it an enjoyable ritual. Depending on the quality of the rules / complexity of the game, the first play through might be a bit ropey, but it's usually fine, and after that you're left with something that you can get hours and hours of fun from. Board games are awesome

Jensson 2y ago

You have to learn the rules of every game you play, every board game rules are simple enough that you can learn them just by reading, the same can not be said for computer games whose rules often are hard to grasp even after hundreds of hours of having played them. So if you like knowing how the game you play works then board games is such a breath of fresh air compared to computer games where so many mechanics are black boxes that you have to reverse engineer to figure out what they do because they aren't described anywhere. Like, exactly how does armor reduce damage? How do defense affect chance to get hit? When does this conditional effect apply? All such things are often very opaque etc in computer games, since they don't have to describe them to you to make the game playable, and that makes it extremely frustrating to try to learn the game, you can play the game but you can't make any decisions since you don't know what anything does. Even worse, computer game tooltips and manuals often lie to you, giving you the wrong numbers or describe it in a different way than it was coded so it doesn't do what it says it does. A very common example is percentages, what is 150% damage bonus? Sometimes it adds 50% damage, sometimes it adds 150% damage, you never really know and sometimes the same game uses both versions. That never happens in board games since the written text is the implementation.