...because you shouldn’t expect to be competitive against someone who has played the game for a while.
Try it before you knock it—I bet that if you’re the kind of person posting on Less Wrong, if you have someone who explains the rules well, and if you’re really spending all your mental energy focusing on figuring the game out, you’ll stand a good chance of winning a lot of games on the first go. That’s my experience so far.
That said, it might be even more fun playing against other people who are all new.
I strongly agree with this. In general, most people don’t work to optimise their strategy, and a newbie who’s used to thinking about long-term or meta-strategies is highly likely to win or come very close on their first attempt.
Depends on the game. I actually have a success story at this sort of thing: I went to a board game convention this summer where I learned a game called Galaxy: the Dark Ages at a demo. That same week, I actually made it to the final round of the Galaxy tournament (and may have done even better if I hadn’t made a rather terrible careless mistake).
I think the reason this happened is because a lot of the complexity of Galaxy is just due to interactions between players: the rules themselves are very simple. Diplomacy may also be like that (I know the rules, but I’ve never played, so I don’t know what it’s like in practice). You can use your existing knowledge of how
Other games—Dominion comes to mind—would be harder to pick up in half an hour because
That said, it might be even more fun playing against other people who are all new.
Probably not. People don’t enjoy being thrashed and the situation can become socially awkward. Leveling the playing field somewhat by having players with existing competence makes things more challenging and is less likely to provoke people into just having sour grapes and refusing to play that game again.
Try it before you knock it—I bet that if you’re the kind of person posting on Less Wrong, if you have someone who explains the rules well, and if you’re really spending all your mental energy focusing on figuring the game out, you’ll stand a good chance of winning a lot of games on the first go. That’s my experience so far.
That said, it might be even more fun playing against other people who are all new.
I strongly agree with this. In general, most people don’t work to optimise their strategy, and a newbie who’s used to thinking about long-term or meta-strategies is highly likely to win or come very close on their first attempt.
Depends on the game. I actually have a success story at this sort of thing: I went to a board game convention this summer where I learned a game called Galaxy: the Dark Ages at a demo. That same week, I actually made it to the final round of the Galaxy tournament (and may have done even better if I hadn’t made a rather terrible careless mistake).
I think the reason this happened is because a lot of the complexity of Galaxy is just due to interactions between players: the rules themselves are very simple. Diplomacy may also be like that (I know the rules, but I’ve never played, so I don’t know what it’s like in practice). You can use your existing knowledge of how
Other games—Dominion comes to mind—would be harder to pick up in half an hour because
Probably not. People don’t enjoy being thrashed and the situation can become socially awkward. Leveling the playing field somewhat by having players with existing competence makes things more challenging and is less likely to provoke people into just having sour grapes and refusing to play that game again.