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Passion is everything. Years spent around a table, submerged in rulebooks, miniatures, cards and meeples, have created and reinforced the skin of tabletop gamers; a shell made up of victories and defeats, but above all of pure and healthy fun.
Perhaps, after so many games, many hours spent managing farms or defeating monsters, we take it for granted that the beginning was not easy for us either. The first few times you’ve been seated in front of a scoreboard, you’ve heard the words “worker placement” or “draft”, or you’ve been asked the question, “Are you German or American?” and you thought it was some sort of trick to understanding your political beliefs… Well, there is always a first time for everything.
Sometimes it happens that someone, looking at your kallax, asks you “and those?” ; and in your mind you open your entire collection and pontificate about your first game, about your favorite game, or about the one you bought by mistake or about the one you never get to play, while the audience of newbies looks at you with bright eyes, eager to get passionate. Then you shake your head and think of a rational and persuasive way to recruit new volunteers.
One of the most difficult tasks for an experienced tabletop player is to properly introduce those players who stopped at Risk and Monopoly. It is known that jumping over the obstacle is hard, but there are many titles that can do the job to make it painless.
Beginning with beasts of the caliber of Nemesis or Gloomhaven is certainly not recommended, even if opening these Pandora’s boxes with our organizers could be a joy for the eyes and an incentive to become a pro. But if we let the newbies take more than a small peek, running away from titles like this is almost guaranteed.
The most famous titles for beginners are perhaps the pillars which the tower of the modern board game is based on, namely The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. These games are very simple to explain, fast and with modern mechanics; the appetizer before the binge in short.
And then there are games of slightly higher complexity; the real introductory ones; the playful terrain where you understand whether the seeds, you are sowing, will germinate or not. One of my favorites is 7 wonders: light game, always fresh and without downtime. In addition, it is playable up to 7 players, a significant added value when you want to avoid “party games” if there are a lot of guests.
A recent introductory game slightly more complex, but really valid, is Creature Comforts: exceptional graphics that hide a real pearl where apparently heavy worker placement mechanics merge with the lightness of fast turns and limited duration. Little Rocket Games, which brought this title to Italy, is also specialized in this type of game, fresh titles that aim to bring everyone into the modern playful world, from children to grandparents: Hens or Coney are small masterpieces which, in their simplicity, remain light years away from banality and offer rounds of deep lateral thinking.
And after the first game… there is the second. And perhaps a title like Wingspan represents the true initiation rite for neophyte: certainly, non-trivial mechanics, combined with a gameplay that in a limited duration gives a couple of hours of ornithological concentration, will make us understand who can go to the next level.
There should be many other entry level titles to dissect, from Patchwork to Flamecraft, from Splendor to Starship Captains.
But perhaps the secret to transforming a novice into an avid meeple placer lies not so much in the game as in the approach. Explaining even a simple title to those who know almost nothing about the game is a real challenge, which must be taken with a grain of salt. But on the other hand, those who are used to table setting have learned that the weapon of patience, if well sharpened, enters the soul of even the furthest and most grumpy of guests.
Maybe you need the right tempo, the right rhythm and the right dose of empathy than the right title. Passion does not come from what you do, but from the approach you have as same as the motivation to study mathematics.
Maybe we forgot when the spark was born and from whom. Certainly, however, we had good teachers. And it is our responsibility to teach the same to others, because we owe it to our passion.
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