Teaching the Wednesday Table a Game That Died in Round One

Our Wednesday group is four to six people depending who’s on shift that week, mostly people from the neighborhood plus one guy who drives in from the county for it, and we rotate who picks the game. I picked Vast: The Crystal Caverns off the strength of one great solo game I’d had a few weeks earlier, and I stood up in front of the table and told everyone this was going to be unlike anything we’d played, five completely different rulebooks stapled to one board, and everyone should trust me on this. That’s the sentence I think about now with some regret.

The problem announced itself about fifteen minutes into the teach. I was explaining the Knight’s dungeon-crawl rules to two people while the person assigned the Cave was staring at her own separate rulebook with an expression I’ve only otherwise seen on people I’m handing a violation notice to. The Cave role is a genuinely strange, semi-automated system, you’re not so much playing a character as running a small machine that reacts to what everyone else does, and there is no good way to explain that role while simultaneously explaining four other roles to four other people who all need different information at different times.

We got through one round. One. By the time everyone actually understood their own piece of the puzzle well enough to make a real decision, an hour and a half had passed with two people checking the clock the way I recognize from every meeting I’ve sat through where somebody’s agenda ran long. I called it. Not because the game was bad, I still think it’s a genuinely interesting design, but because I’d made a rookie mistake as a teacher, I taught the whole table simultaneously instead of teaching one role deep and letting the others pick it up by watching, which is exactly what I know from experience actually works for asymmetric games and exactly what I skipped because I was excited and wanted everyone playing right away.

Deb wasn’t even there that night, she doesn’t come to Wednesdays much, but I told her about it afterward and she asked the obvious question, which is why I didn’t just teach it the way I’d want a violation explained to a resident, one issue at a time, in order, instead of dumping the whole code section on somebody who just wants to know what’s wrong with their fence. She’s right and I hate that she’s right. I’ve since taught two other asymmetric games to that same table and both went fine, because I finally applied the lesson. One role deep, the rest by osmosis, and don’t stand up and promise everyone an experience unlike anything they’ve played until you’ve confirmed you can actually deliver the teach that gets them there. The county guy still brings up Vast sometimes, not unkindly, just as the night we played one round of a five-role game and called it early. I’ll live it down eventually. Probably.