Meeting up
We spoke to a lot of people in the
course of our highly scientific research for this series of posts - our core
gaming group, our wider circle, the miniature guys, the casuals, the
pretending-to-be-casuals, our collective reluctant and faintly embarrassed
partners, and even the new guys who we wouldn’t play Chaos in the Old
World with…. yet. As you can
imagine, we got wide and varying answers on most of the subjects, but this
question on how you feel before a game night kept coming back the same.
Everyone is excited, and everyone is looking forward to it.
Is every board game night first and
foremost a social event? A comfortable evening in the company of people you
already know you like a lot? Something you look forward to like a couple of
beers with good friends? Our circle think so - but then our groups all play in
someone’s
house, or on holiday together, or occasionally a pub. We don’t really encounter ‘strangers’ - unless they are
introduced by a friend. The focus is on the people, not the game. You’re as likely to look
forward to catching up with people as you are to counting out the cards.
The feeling’s different when you’re were heading to a
hobby shop because you really wanted to play something specific, and didn’t mind who it was
against. Those kinds of games can come with
anticipation that borders on apprehension – the pre-match nerves of a game with something on
the line. You might be off to a tournament , spiced up by the added danger of
playing with strangers.
There’s anticipation in our more homely, social gaming
too, but it’s
more the thrill of playing something new, discovering a new interaction,
testing a new deck, or getting one over on David at last. As (relatively) mature
people with (comparatively) serious jobs and family lives, our group is longer
on money that it is on time. That leads to an oversupply of new games to play,
new cardboard to punch out, new cards to shuffle, new plastic to examine, and new rules to learn…
Breaking out a new one
Everyone wants to to have fun in the
games evening, and for everyone else to feel the same, but with new games come
new opportunities to steal a march on your friends. With the level playing
field of the new game comes the chance to figure out the meta-game first, or
work out that new trick before anyone else spots it. The perennial underdog can
snatch a couple of early victories, or the experienced players can take
pleasure in racing to find a game’s rhythm. While everyone else is saving up to buy
a cow, you could be working out what to do with the magic beans!
But! Before you can get all nervous
energy and brain-gymnastics, it’s time to navigate the choppy waters of the rulebook.
It’s this polite but
often fraught period that starts to mark out the power gamers from the rules
lawyers, the slowcoaches and those who say they don’t care about winning
but secretly really do.
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| I am looking on page 236... |
You can watch them round the table. The
rules lawyer is easiest to spot, going through the rulebook line by line; the
subtler sub-species will plough on through when they know they don’t have the group’s full attention,
storing up opportunities to pounce on some obscure and unheard clause later in
the piece. The really cunning ones look the rules up in secret before coming,
or sneak a look when other people are labouring through their turns! The
lawyers don’t
just want to maintain propriety - they want to win. The lawyers’ stiffest opposition
comes from the impatient, who suspect them of being slowcoaches, and can’t understand why we
can’t just get started
and learn the rules as we go along. In an evening which we might squeeze four
hours of gaming in if we are really lucky, if the coffee’s good and the snacks
are sugary, the lawyers are usually outnumbered.
Get on with it
If it’s your game that’s on the table, then chances are you’re donning the lawyer’s robes yourself this
time. That’s
a tough role because pretty much everyone we asked expressed some degree of
impatience with the whole process. So you’re up against the clock. Here’s a selection of
snippets from what people fessed up to when we asked them:
- “I wish I was better, but I soon lose interest and want to crack on…”
- “I'll try and absorb the basics but…”
- "I do try and pay attention but…
- “I try to pay as much attention as possible, but…”
- “I do pay attention, but I want the explanation over with as soon as possible.”
- “I can’t listen to instructions. I want to, but my brain won’t let me.”
Most people like to get things going and
learn as they go along, making mistakes, being reminded, seeing what other
people do. Everyone dreads the moment that begins with ‘Ah, actually guys
apparently we’ve
been…’
and ends with ‘…okay
okay okay, we’ll
start doing it like that next turn’. As a rules lawyer, or the poor fool who ends
up in that role, there’s nothing more simultaneously frustrating or
secretly vindicating than the cry of ‘Aww, you never told me that!’ when you know that
you definitely did. That’s one of the wonderful things about playing
socially –
we’re all bound to be
nice to each other and laugh off that first glitchy, confused, unfolding
playthrough. Some rules can lurk for months before being discovered.
So let’s get on with it, give it a go. We can cook up
plans as we go along, tell the same jokes, lay the same traps and get caught in
them ourselves. We’ve
only got a few hours, until next time at least.
