How to teach a board game to one person

Play the first game open-handed

This is the biggest advantage and almost nobody uses it. With one other person there is no fairness problem in playing with your cards visible and talking through your reasoning.

It compresses learning enormously. Instead of explaining that a card can be held for later, you show a hand and say: I am keeping this because the market has two of them and I want the set. That is a rule, a strategy and a worked example in one sentence, and it lands in a way that abstract explanation does not.

The cost is one throwaway game. That is nothing -- and the game is not really thrown away, because the person learning is engaged rather than being lectured.

Teach the action before the scoring

The standard order -- explain the components, then the rules, then how you win -- is backwards for one learner. Scoring is abstract until you can see what it is describing.

Better sequence: what you do on a turn, three turns played, then how those turns score. Now the scoring explanation refers to things on the table that they just did, and it takes a third as long.

The exception is a game where an early decision is irreversible and scoring-dependent. Lost Cities is the clear case: committing to an expedition costs 20 points, and someone who does not know that will commit badly and feel cheated. Mention that one rule up front, then go back to the normal order.

Start before you have finished explaining

Say three sentences and deal. Everything else can be explained as it becomes relevant, and most of it will become relevant within a few turns.

This works at two players specifically because you can pause without holding up a table. Reaching a situation the rules cover, stopping, explaining it, and continuing takes ten seconds and is retained far better than the same rule delivered in a block five minutes earlier.

The rule of thumb: if a rule will not come up in the first three turns, do not mention it yet.

Timing and framing

• Never teach at the end of a long day. Rules at 11pm are how a good game gets a first impression it never recovers from.
• Do not oversell it. Saying this is the best game ever sets a bar the first confused game cannot clear. Saying it takes about half an hour and the rules are short sets an accurate one.
• Do not apologize for the game either. Saying it seems complicated but tells them to expect difficulty before they have found any.
• Let them make a bad move. Correcting every suboptimal decision turns the game into a test. One suggestion per game is plenty.

Which games are easiest to teach this way

Games with one core action are ideal for the start-before-explaining approach, because there is almost nothing to hold back. Jaipur: take goods or sell goods. Patchwork: buy a patch or move past your opponent. Lost Cities: play a card, draw a card.

Onitama is the extreme case -- move according to a card, then hand that card to your opponent -- and can genuinely be taught in under two minutes with no open-handed game needed.

Games with a symbol language, 7 Wonders Duel most of all, resist this method. You cannot teach the symbols as they come up, because they all come up at once on the first row of cards. Save that one for later.