So you want to teach the rules of a board game? What follows is my best advice on how to do so, based on years of teaching many different games. It’s certainly not the only way to teach a game, but in my opinion, the suggestions below hit the most important points.

Getting Ready to Teach

To start with, you must learn the game. That’s the single most important requirement for teaching a game. It means reading through the rules in advance of the game and looking through the rest of the components to ensure that you know how they work together with those rules. I don’t worry about reading through every card or every space on a board, but I do think it’s important to understand the general shape of things.

If you haven’t played the game in a while, you should probably read the rules again. I have a few dozen games that I’ve played enough that I can teach them cold, but for the rest, I usually pick up the rules and at least skim them before throwing the game into my bag for game night. Continue reading →