How to replace the rulebook: creating learning tutorials for tabletop games
We spent the first couple of articles giving an overview of the board game market, why it’s facing challenges despite the incredible growth of the past few years and what kind of digital solutions and companion tools are already available on the market. Today, we get to the meat of it.
Getting a feel for the game
The first thing we do, if the title is not something we’re familiar with, is getting to know the game: we read about it online, watch a trailer, talk with the designer, and inspect the box and how the publisher presents it. The tactile experience of the game is also essential: we open the box, check the punchboards, the elements disposition in the box and take pictures of everything we pop-out or unwrap. These references will be later used to represent the game setup for new players correctly.
One thing we pay particular attention to is how many concepts to explain during the unboxing: what’s the purpose of these green cards, how do you build a standee or what those round tokens are.
Understanding the rules
Of course, the critical thing when building a tutorial is to understand the rules well and figure out which ones confuse players or get overlooked.
It’s also imperative to understand why some rules are ignored or wrongly applied: is it a fault of the original rulebook? A question of wording? Something unintuitive we should improve?
Cards and other text-dense elements
When a game presents a significant part of the rules on game elements themselves, such as cards or player boards, we go through them and abstract their purpose in separate groups. For example, this card belongs to the subgroup of “Attack” cards, and this one to the “Getting Resources” subgroup. This is an essential step because it allows us to explain design concepts to players without explicitly going through every single element of the game, which would make learning it a very protracted affair. Players in need of more details can always rely on the Rule Lookup Tool, which we will discuss in a future blog post.
We too watch How to Play videos
How to Play videos are a useful resource — there’s no denying that the good they’ve done to the hobby is incalculable. We’re fans of Watch it Played, Rahdo, Tabletop and others, and we’ve often discussed with the people running these show. We see Dized as a fundamentally different way to learn board games, not a competing product — to be honest, we would love to involve many content creators in various aspects of Dized!
If we’re not familiar with the game, we take a look at how others explain it and use that as a foundation upon which we build our own thing. Dized Tutorials are interactive: the way we structure information can be, and usually is, very different from the structure of a linear medium like video.
Many How to Play videos give you a rundown of the rules at the very beginning. That is not our approach — the question we try to answer is: how much does a player need to know before being able to perform the first action in the game?
Planning the steps
Once we have the whole picture, we break down what we learned in a slide presentation (or mindmap, depending on the game), trying to figure out if a specific Step should be explained before or after another. Rather than trying to figure out what is the very first Step of the Tutorial, it is usually more efficient to look at a middle-of-the-game Turn and work backward from there. In this case, the question we are looking at is: “What is that you need to know to be able to play Turn five?”
After settling for a Steps order, we create a flowchart, detailing where players will be asked questions about their game or given a choice which will influence the pace of the Tutorial.
The upcoming Tools
Right now the process of building a Tutorial involves a lot of handcrafting. One of the reasons we had an Indiegogo campaign was to gather enough resources to be able to develop the “Dized Tools.” When ready, these Tools will not only allow us to open up the editor to third parties such as Publishers and individual Designers but also dramatically speed up Tutorial iterations, A/B testing and assets creation.
Testing
Before starting work on the Kingdomino Tutorial, we played the game about 60 times with different pools of players. Kingdomino is a relatively streamlined game — 60 games is plenty to understand how to teach it and be smart about it.
Once the first version of the Tutorial was ready, we tested it with internal groups of friends who never played the game before; their reactions informed our decisions on what to change: which sections went on for too long, and which ones could use some reworking.
At this year’s SPIEL in Essen, some of you were able to see our work in action — next week we’ll tell you how it went!
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