Grading Rulebooks Like Lab Reports

Every year around week two I do a lab safety demo where I explain how to light a Bunsen burner, and every year I time myself doing it, because if the explanation runs past ninety seconds I’ve lost a third of the room to fidgeting before I’ve even struck the match. That habit did not stay at school. I noticed a while back that I do the exact same thing with a new board game’s rules explanation, quietly counting in my head, and if I blow past fifteen minutes before anyone’s touched a component I start getting the same feeling I get watching twenty-six kids’ eyes glaze over during photosynthesis.

I used to think this was just me being impatient. It’s not impatience, actually, it’s diagnostic. When a rulebook explanation runs long it’s almost never because the game is deep, it’s because the rulebook itself buried the important stuff under three paragraphs of flavor text before telling you how a turn actually works. That’s the same failure mode as a lesson plan that opens with fifteen minutes of background before getting to the thing kids actually need to know to do the lab. Cut the preamble, lead with the mechanism, backfill the flavor once people already understand the shape of what they’re doing.

I’ve started actually teaching games the way I teach labs, which sounds like a strange sentence to write down but has genuinely improved how fast my group picks things up. State the goal first, one sentence. Show the smallest possible complete turn, physically, cards in hand, before explaining any of the exceptions. Save the edge cases for when someone actually hits one, not preemptively, because nobody retains an exception they haven’t needed yet. It’s the same principle behind why I don’t front-load every safety rule before a lab when half of them won’t come up that day. You teach the thing they need right now and trust that the exceptions will surface themselves.

The downside of thinking this way constantly is that I’ve become genuinely hard to please on a first rules explanation. My group knows by now that if I start narrating “okay, so, we’re at about eight minutes here” mid-explanation, I’m not being cute, I’m actually tracking it, and I will absolutely dock a game a little in my head if it can’t get me to a first meaningful decision inside a reasonable window. Arnak earns real credit here. Terraforming Mars, for all I love the engine once it’s running, does not, and I think that’s a fair thing to hold against it even if the depth eventually pays the time back.

Anyhoo. I don’t think this is a flaw in me exactly, more a professional hazard that leaked sideways into a hobby. Twenty-some years from now I’ll probably still be doing this, timing rules explanations in my head the same way I time a lab demo, and I’ve mostly made peace with it.