The comprehensibility of a rules explanation primarily hinges on what’s said in the first 2 minutes. That’s the time you have to anchor the crucial why that is the means and the ends of the game or, otherwise, give an explanation which is unnecessarily hard to take in. Too many explanations start elsewhere. And many which offer a passing overview, offer too little to build on.

The secret to an effective teach relies on a thoughful overview, one that is neither too short nor too long. Because the qualities of a overview matter quite a bit, let’s dub it a microteach and see what makes it different.

microteach (n): An overview which draws a clear connection between what one does in a game (the means) and how it helps one win (the ends) in 1 to 2 minutes. The game is already set up as a prop to facilitate the explanation. It serves as the crucial core upon which to build an understanding as a rules explanation unfolds.

This is the cornerstone upon which a next-level explanation builds. It’s at least 1 minute, but no more than 2. With anything less than this rightly-sized sound bite, the listener will struggle to make sense of what he’s hearing. It’ll leave details momentarily floating in midair, the way rulebooks do.

An explanation must do better. Rather than leaving the audience to grasp at floaties, it must help the audience take captive what it’s hearing, and seeing. Before getting into the series of posts^[1], each showcasing a sample microteach, let’s unlock the blueprint.

🚀 Scratch the itch of knowing the means and the ends

More than anything a player wants to know the object or ends of the game. Even if a game is, as many are, most points wins, he wants to know what’s being scored. Reveal it. It’s not important to cover everything, but at least rough it out after laying down any preliminaries.

Furthermore, he’ll want to know what actions he must take to obtain that. These represent his vehicle or means.

The means and the ends are distinct things, though intrinsically connected. Job #1 is paint a clear picture of both and show the connection.

🚀 Substantiate (at least 1 minute)

An overview that’s too short is almost as bad as none at all. While many expert vloggers do remember their overviews, they’re just short blurbs. Inert flavor text. They lack the substance to build on because they fail to paint motion and direction.

I suffered the same shortcoming in my early teaching. But many teaches later, the technique evolved and that got rectified.

The realization was demonstration beats words. It’s the reason an overview requires no less than 1 minute. It is effectively a quick, highly-abbreviated teach. A microteach.

🚀 Simplify (less than 2 minutes)

Finish the overview in about 2 minutes. It’s sufficient. The upper-end of the time constraint is meant to force the teacher to decide what aspects and details are, at this stage, superfluous. He trims them away. The art of elucidating, more than anything else, involves honing this one skill.

Allowing important caveats to fall to floor as if they didn’t exist allays questions which might be raised by their mention. Since the present aim is satisfy the nagging questions, avoid raising new ones. Momentarily lose details.

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

Getting this means there’s some finesse in editing what gets covered now. Even seasoned explainers make the mistake of fully explaining a concept at its first mention. They have no sense for layering, for providing the more important details now and saving the exceptions for later.

Simplification is impossible without layering.

🚀 Enhance understanding with props

The setup isn’t worth explaining (even in teach videos) since it does little to aid understanding^[2]. Besides, most people use the rulebook for that.

Have the game already set up. It doesn’t need to be entirely valid. It may’ve even been altered in a few small ways to enhance the explanation: a certain situation arranged on the board, a particular hand prepared for a player, certain components hidden from view. This won’t have taken more than a minute’s prep.

More importantly, the overview must employ the game as a prop to facilitate what needs taught. 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. This’ll make it easier to assimilate and remember. Don’t worry about messing things up. Things’ll need rejiggering after the explanation, anyway.

🚀 Order preliminaries before secondaries

Teach concepts in the right order. Everything depends on a certain amount of context. To mention one concept, not having mentioned the one it depends on can be distracting.

Touching upon scoring is key. It might seem hard, but laying the necessary groundwork to cover that doesn’t require as much as one might think.

Try not to mention trading resource cards^[3] or shipping and trading goods^[4] until one has mentioned how to get them. This holds for the overview and explanation alike.

Conclusion

Mention how the game ends, if not in this pass, then the next. If not a first-order concern, it is at least a second-order one.

Learning to paint a rich enough picture of a game in the listener’s mind takes time. Knowing a game well helps. When one has only a reading of the rules to go on, he can’t expect to be nearly as good as he’ll be after he has a few plays under his belt. This is mainly because its simple core becomes, to the practiced elucidater, ever clearer.

As an aside, mind and politely quiet these two guys: the one who adds the details the teacher left out and the one who interrupts with questions. The one readds the omitted distractions. The other disrupts continuity. Neither serves to improve what an overview intends.

Take compassion on the listener by understanding his dilemma.

He sits for an explanation and the person explaining the game, even after giving his mostly flavor text overview, dives into a particular game concept, then another. All the while he’s left scratching his head and wondering why this information matters. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing and how these details help him win. That overview provided no real grounding.

Perhaps 10 minutes later the details for scoring are explained. It’s at this moment everything which preceded retroactively falls into place. That this happens at all evidences the problem. He had been carrying a cognitive load he had nowhere to rightly put. The flood of understanding is this load being released.

The premise of a microteach and the reason for layering is to mitigate these dilemmas. This is no less important in a video teach as a live one.

It starts by alleviating his nagging concern for what he must do to win and provides him with a useful core. Even if one never learns how this fits into the bigger picture, he’ll benefit from learning to start this way. Two minutes later and he can always fall back on his usual approach. With this one adjustment, he’s all but guaranteed better results even lacking a knack for explanation.

That’s no snake oil, just good medicine.

Now read the sample microteaches^[5]. The games chosen are intentionially older, ubiquitious. These are not full explanations. They’re the sample cores on which that would be built.