By If you love playing games, it’s going to be well worth your while to learn how to effectively teach others how to play the games you enjoy. This way, you can easily share your passion with important people in your life. But depending on their experience with learning new games and their interest in trying their hand at something new, you might need to put in a lot of work as you try to teach them.
So whether you’re wanting to teach your significant other how to play a favorite family game or are wanting to share your love of games with an elderly loved one in a senior living community, here are three tips for teaching someone a new game.
Know Your Audience
Before you go about trying to teach someone a new game, you’ll first want to choose a game that’s going to match the audience you’re trying to teach.
For younger kids or seniors, it’s usually best to keep games you’re teaching relatively simple so that they can pick the game up quickly and get the play. Additionally, if you know your friend or family member doesn’t particularly like to learn new games, choosing something that will be easy for them will be ideal. And if you’re really wanting to play a more complicated game, consider starting with a simpler game that will be a great foundational way for them to learn certain skills or ways of thinking.
Take Advantage Of Game-Related Content
If you haven’t had a lot of experience successfully teaching games to people in the past, you may want to take advantage of content that other people have made of them going through how to play your particular game.
You can find all kinds of video content online where people explain how to play any given game. With their experience in explaining games, this might prove to be a more effective way to help someone learn how to play. They’ll go over the rules of the game, how to set the game up, and what the play looks like.
Talk Through What You’re Doing And Why
Once you’ve gotten the game set up and are ready to start playing, something that can be helpful in the first few turns of play is to talk through what you’re doing and why you’re choosing to make those decisions in the game. This will help the person you’re teaching to quickly understand what to do on their own turn and what type of things they should consider when making decisions about how to play on their turns, as the strategy aspect of new games can often be hard to pick up on at first.
If you want to teach someone a new game so that they can play it with you now and in the future, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn how to do this effectively.
