Part of the draw of board and card games is that they serve as a microcosm of life. “Here’s how skill is important, but here’s how luck plays a role.” “Here’s capitalism around a card table.” “Learn how much you can trust people as stakes get higher.” “This game starts simple but takes on as much complexity as life itself.”
One thing a realized as I was watching someone learn Euchre recently, is how much I learned about teaching early on by learning to teach games.
If you teach a game wrong, the learner will either (a) never love the game or (b) take a lot longer to do so.
To be able to teach it well, you need to understand the game better than you think, you need to know the right order to present the ideas, you need to engage the people you’re teaching right away. You must be passionate, enthusiastic, forgiving. It helps to know things to compare it to, and you have to know how to check in for understanding along the way.
All this can seem fairly straightforward for a game you’re passionate about – still, it can take teaching multiple people a game to learn the right way to do it.
That, in itself, is a great lesson in the complexity of teaching. Even the most passionate practitioner of a skill (music, mathematics), or avid consumer of a realm of knowledge (history, science) will take years to learn the best way to approach a lesson. All your domain knowledge will do nothing until you know how to convey it and light people up.
What’s your favorite game to teach people to play? How long did it take you to get good at teaching it?