please review my tutorial for Lost Cities

[villager]

https://boardgamearena.com/tutorial?gam ... torial=637

Please go till the end to give your rating. Feedback to change anything appreciated in this thread.

[SilentSnowflake]

Thank you for making this tutorial!

Overall, I think your explanations should be way more concise. Especially in the beginning, the description of the theme in great detail and with many slides and pictures takes up too much room imo. Later, I think the tutorial would benefit from first explaining general gameplay and then continuing to the scoring. As it is now it feels like we are getting lots of scoring details (those are important indeed) and the gameplay info gets a bit scattered in between which I think can be confusing for beginners.

A minor error I noticed is that when the player is supposed to "discard the blue wager card", the red hand points to the blue 9 instead.

[villager]

Thank you for making this tutorial!

Overall, I think your explanations should be way more concise. Especially in the beginning, the description of the theme in great detail and with many slides and pictures takes up too much room imo. Later, I think the tutorial would benefit from first explaining general gameplay and then continuing to the scoring. As it is now it feels like we are getting lots of scoring details (those are important indeed) and the gameplay info gets a bit scattered in between which I think can be confusing for beginners.

A minor error I noticed is that when the player is supposed to "discard the blue wager card", the red hand points to the blue 9 instead.

thank you so much for the valuable feedback... especially the important catch that i had the wrong card being discarded. I have fixed that now.

Your input on the flow is very important. Ive had to balance on getting the tutorial to focus on the most important rules that justify the action, rather than bombarding the beginner with ALL the rules around gameplay. If you have some inputs on how I can restructure this, please advise.

[SilentSnowflake]

Your input on the flow is very important. Ive had to balance on getting the tutorial to focus on the most important rules that justify the action, rather than bombarding the beginner with ALL the rules around gameplay. If you have some inputs on how I can restructure this, please advise.

My biggest issue here is the construction of your example game. It starts with both parties playing lots of wager cards before anyone plays other expedition cards, discards or picks from the discard pile. I think it would be easier to grasp for beginners if

• building of ascending expedition columns
• discarding
• drawing cards from draw pile or discard piles and
• single wager expeditions

were explained and demonstrated before teaching the score calculation for multiple wager expeditions.

Some other thoughts:

• Slide 7 states: "The 5 locations and the expedition routes will be formed here.. one column for each color of the route card", but your marking shows the board where cards are discarded, whereas the expeditions are built below the board. This could cause some confusion.
• On slide 11, you could add "2) Draw a card from the draw deck or one of the discard piles."
• Slide 26: "In this turn, your opponent decided to discard the yellow 3 route card... probably they do not want to invest in that Expedition at all." Now that is quite a bold assumption If I have many high cards of a color early in the game, it's not an unusual move to discard lower cards of that color in the hope of drawing a wager card.
• The summary text on slide 36 would be useful already earlier in the tutorial, maybe after slide 12 before the start of the example game.
• I think it would be good to explicitly point out somewhere in the tutorial that each number card exists only once in each color (for example if my opponent already played a green 7, I can't expect to draw one for my expedition).

[villager]

Hi SilentSnowFlake,
really appreciate the detailed feedback.. some responses..

1) i understand your point on the flow.. thing is I picked an actual reference game replay from BGA played by 2 players who knew the rules, for the tutorial.. so obviously Wager cards were played by them first.

2) for the comment on the Expedition board.. unfortunately the bottom of the board is not highlightable. I'm limited by the BGA tutorial framework. Plus the players are forced to make the right move of playing under the board for the Expedition, for the tutorial to proceed..

3) excellent catch on slide 11.. fixed.

4) i see your point about the summary text at the end.. the point was to slowly explore the rules that is contextually important.. and not summarize everything right at the beginning. Plus that's the guidance from BGA for writing good tutorials.

5) regarding the unique number cards, its been referenced in a few places.. screenshots showing the 5 expedition route cards, and then the card count in Comment 8.

You are simply awesome! PM me if I can fix anything else.

[brisdaz]

At the end when you summarize the rules relating to 8 cards and 20 points extra perhaps put in parenthesis that the 20 points is not multiplied by the expedition cards.