Board Game Arena

not official anymore

Hello ncc,

first a big thank you for your hard work!

I would like to give you some feedback on your tutorial – just my opinion, which might be discussed here.

I like your overview of the game very much. Maybe it is worth to mention that all players use the same dice simultaniously.

Please describe the BGA implementation of the game, not the physical one (otherwise that could be irritating). For example, you said that a player has to roll the dice or mark something on their chart, but this is done automatically. What the player actually has to do is select a row of dice by the green checkmark.

After you mentioned the grouping of the dice, you focus on the „5th die“. I would prefer to start with an explanation of the first 4 dice – the two sets and what they mean. You give a good explanation of it at the end of the tutorial and I would like to see it here in this early place. You could keep it simple here and explain in more detail at the end if needed. Actually I think learners will like this kind of (deepening) repetition, because it helps them to remember.

In general, I would like to have a tutorial more interactive with the interface and the user. Why not start with a description of what can be seen, like e. g. the score sheet? Let the learner do something – choose a row - (as you do later on) and explain what happens after that and what that means for them. As you skip some turns you could stop in between and show what happens after the 5th and 6th cross in a row (for scoring) and so on.

Your description of the „5th die“ is very detailed and feels rather abstract to me. I would prefer to keep this part shorter and more simple. As for the „unique 5th die“ please check here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=51911

Don‘t put too much information in one step, e. g. the special case of a free throw can kept behind until it happens near the end of the game.

Last but not least let me tell you that I appreciate your efforts and hope you find my comments helpful.

I agree with a lot of what cigma said. I know it's time consuming to do a tutorial because I did one a long time ago. It was fun, but time consuming and I had to go back through it a number of times. (I think they've changed it since then though.)

I agree it would be useful to mention that everyone uses the same set of dice, and even point out that "the roll" is the small dice up there at the top. Followed by pointing out that for this implementation it's not important since all the combos will be done for you. It just helps to understand the interface.

I really seriously agree with focusing more at first on the 2 set combos made off each roll that you have to pick from and concentrate on that, getting that idea down first. Only then approach the 5th die as the left over. The person who taught this to me started out by explaining the 5th die and I had no clue what he was talking about. He's one of the few people I can reasonably learn games from (I'm a rule reader), but that was not the case here. I was just lost. After that game we brought in another player and he started with the same thing, and I just stopped him and told him to let go of that 5th die thing and explain the sets first, cause I could tell the new person was confused as well. The 5th die has zero meaning if you don't get the idea of grouping those two sets first. I thought this was the most confusing part, and the most confusing part has to be done carefully. (And maybe repeated 2-3 times.)

If I didn't already know the rules, I think the whole "unique 5th die" would have confused me. Starting with the sets will probably help that, but also stopping at points during the turns to show the choosing of the rows and how that shows on the score card, to see what is actually happening there. (It is probably the case that this might be confusing regardless, until you see what the score card does. Sometimes not doing it yourself manually is a detriment to learning.)

The scoring needs to be done early on. The whole game is played through before this is explained, meaning no one knows the point of selecting the sets. Again, this can be shown during the plays and showing how it got marked on the score card. Then when passing to the "0" column stop and explain that, and when passing into the >5 section, stop and explain that. Note what it's showing on the score card.

And speaking of scoring, I think the way the score is shown in the explanation boxes will be confusing to a lot of people, i.e. you're now in the 7th space, so (7-5)x 40. That threw me off, and I know how to score, and I'm comfortable with math. And not all gamers are nerdy math people. I think it would work better to just stress how many X's are in the right-hand set of columns of C -- i.e. in my example, that's 2, and then connect that back to the scoring number listed on the score card. There's nothing difficult about this, really, but it would have taken me much longer to figure it out doing the math as you show cause I'd have to really look at it and see what you were doing.

You maybe could add a note about where it puts the totals and such. Like at one point you mentioned that if you hit 0 in a row, put that in the right column of D, but I don't think you mentioned what D does at all, so it came out of nowhere. I also noticed a couple of people I played with getting confused that any row up thru 4 X's is -200, period, not per X. Then doesn't go to 0 until you get that 5th box. So I'm also thinking of how other people have learned this and not just me.

I know I'm being long-winded and hope that doesn't make things difficult. I also know the tutorial said it was in alpha, so I don't know how well it's working or how easy/difficult it is to work with. I should try doing one again.

Overall, I agree with what has been said.
All I would add is:
1) Emphasize on how the further from the centers rows are worth more points (and overall explain in more details how points are calculated), compensating their being harder to reach. (Thus it's a balance between these two aspects.) (The idea of keeping in the center is a simplification and it's even partly incorrect: for instance, in the beginning, it's quite good to have for instance two 5 or two 9, more than even having two 7).
2) I think it's better to emphasize the need to balance out 5th dices when they are very uneven rather than when they are even. At one point in your tutorial, you have too many 1, and thus you need to take from the other numbers. It's the perfect moment to explain what to with the 5th dice!