Microteach

The comprehensibility of a rules explanation primarily hinges on the overview. It’s where you anchor the crucial “why bother?” that is the means and the ends or, otherwise, give an explanation which is unnecessarily hard to take in. Too many start elsewhere. Or they skip immediately to explaining things.

The essence of “why bother?” is the clear connection between what you do and how it helps you win. That’s what an overview – the first glimpse of what a game is – must provide. Get that done in 2 minutes and you have the cornerstone of a next-level explanation.

It will feel abrupt because of how much it packs in. That’s what makes it a microteach. It’s the explanation before the explanation. But that dense core does work: it leaves fewer questions dangling in midair and allows the explanation to unfold in layers. It helps slow digestion and, ultimately, unburden the listener.

Blueprint

Your one job is to connect. It’s what you carry top of mind in the overview and throughout the explanation. The rest – simplify, sequence, and show – is technique.

🚀 Connect

More than anything else, the players want to know the objective. Even if a game is, as many are, “most points wins,” they’re eager to see what’s being scored. Scratch that itch. Then show them the means to getting that. Before the overview ends they must have a passing sense for how their play will be measured.

If your overview is too simplistic – that is, if it feels mostly like flavor text – it won’t do the job. The means and the ends are distinct but connected.

To nail the essence your overview must clearly connect those dots.

🚀 Simplify

The 2-minute cap forces you to decide what details are, at this stage, superfluous. Trim them away. More than anything else, learning how to defer detail is the art in the explaining and the key to pacing comprehension.

Setting important caveats aside for the moment keeps extra questions down. Since the aim is to satisfy questions, be careful about when you raise new ones. Defer detail. You manage overwhelm by limiting how many loops are open at once.

The incremental approach covers all important concepts in multiple passes, touches upon them with increasing clarity. A full teach involves roughly 3 passes—head (overview), skeleton (structure), body (the main concepts fleshed out)—with one final pass where the floor is swept of any loose details.

Getting this means developing finesse for what gets covered and when. Sometimes even seasoned explainers fully explain complex concepts at first mention. They have no sense for how to layer, or that they ought to be doing it at all.

🚀 Sequence

Teach concepts in the right order. Everything depends, to some degree, on what came before. Mentioning a concept that depends on something which is still nebulous is distracting. It spawns questions, the very thing you’re trying to manage.

Use the layers to your advantage. Allow an explanation to touch upon a concept multiple times. You start in one layer with a light touch and in the next layer increase the fidelity. Delay connecting one thing to the other until the other has been brought into sharp enough focus.

🚀 Show

Have the game already set up. It is not usually worth explaining how it happens^[1], and it doesn’t need to be entirely valid. It may, to enhance the explanation, even have been altered from what’s normal: a certain situation arranged on the board, a particular hand prepared for a player, certain components hidden from view. This may involve a little forethought and a tweak or two.

As good explanations are incremental and visual, expect to use the props in every layer including the initial one.

Show and tell.

Point to cards, move figures, push cubes, approximating how these things are done in play—not in full, but enough to hint at it. These gestures make the demo easier to assimilate and remember. Don’t worry about messing things up. Things will need rejiggering after the explanation, anyway.

Mind Your Listeners’ Load

Being kind to the players entails you understand their dilemma.

They sit for an explanation. If you offer a flavor-text overview and then dive into game concepts one after another, they’re left wondering why any of it matters. You hand them a knapsack. They’re distracted trying to connect the dots because you aren’t actively managing their burden. Parcel by parcel, the sack gets heavier. Then, after what feels like an age, you fill in the blanks—the very ones you created—and in a flood of understanding, the sack vanishes.

That this happens at all indicates a problem. Your neglect to carry some of the parcels hindered the listener’s ability to receive your instruction. When you’re later told about the rule you “didn’t” teach—the one you know you did—you now know why.

It boils down to burden management.

It starts with imparting enough to relieve the nagging concern about what you do and how that helps you win. Shoot for having the game loosely gel by the end of the second minute. Do that and, even if you have no knack for the finer points of a delivery, better results are guaranteed.

And now some examples^[2]:

They’re meant to model the thinking which goes into an intelligible teach, not to be replicated verbatim.

The titles here are intentionally older for their ubiquity.