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Re:Simplifying Board Games by jefftk on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @01:01PM (#23393260)
Depends on your gaming culture. If you're friends with a lot of people who play games, and you learn games from each other, then it will be very rare to have a game that no one present has ever played before. When I think through the games I play, I remember being taught all of them by other people.

I wonder whether maybe game-makers are usually in this sort of environment, and so don't think as much about the experience of a group of four beginners sitting down to try out a game?

Re:Simplifying Board Games by pessimizer on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @02:27PM (#23394288)
> If you're friends with a lot of people who play games, and you learn games from each other, then it will be very rare to have a game that no one present has ever played before.

Only if you and all of your friends play from a very limited, range of games. In my experience, people like this exclusively play games that are currently or have been recently heavily marketed.

I'm friends with a lot of people who play games, I own a disturbing amount of games, and I sit at a table and play a game that no one at the table has played about weekly during normal times, maybe biweekly now that I'm stuck online. As a person who researches and finds a lot of games, it's very often me who's teaching the game that none of us have played.

In my experience, people who are really into games are constantly playing oddball, older, and obscure games, from the rules.