Do most people study the strategy tips for new games, or ignore and learn through playing?

[Swfcdan]

What are peoples thoughts on the strategy tips for BGA games. Most have them, and some are quite in depth.
I personally kinda wish they didn't have them, as they are so easy just to click on in game and get some ideas from. For me, part of the fun of learning games is learning strategies as you play. So I personally basically never look at them, even for games I'm experienced with, but I wonder if most people do. It feels pretty artificial being told how to play a game well as soon as you've learnt how to play it.
There are many ways people could google strategy tips for games if they wanted, but I feel like forcing that would mean only people who really want to better themselves at a game would do it- and would probably be for more experienced players. Having the tips so easily accessible on BGA means many people check them I imagine, and it sort of removes part of the learning curve which there should be in any game, and pushes people straight to intermediate level almost. I want to learn the games strategies myself, it's a big part of the fun of playing.
So I wish the strategy tips just didn't exist, only keep the how to play guides.
What do others think?

[frogstar_A]

I like the strategy tips and even write them for one game!

I don't see why having strategy tips is bad . You would never take up a new sport by learning the rules and then just trying by trial and error to improve. You always get coaching and help from friends and other players. Strategy tips is just the same in a BGA world.

On BGA I generally don't read them right away, but if I'm struggling to get better at a game after a few goes then yes I will . They help me play better and that in turn makes it more enjoyable.

For me there's no fun in losing every time because I've failed to work out a key strategy that everyone else knows.

[GeraldineMerida]

I agree with the OP. I hate the existence of the strategy tips, not because I am tempted to look at them and boost myself to interrnediate level, but because I resent that some other players can spend 5 minutes reading up on a new game and gain insights it may have taken me months of play to gain.

For me, the analogy is less with sports (where an unskilled player will always play poorly, even given tips) and more with cheat codes for video games: people use them to play above the level of their real skill.

Of course, in very heavy games, no amount of tips can cover all cases, and a great player will always beat someone who has just 'studied', but in medium weight or lightweight games, the strategy tips give quite an advantage.

[Sheba-leila]

Ich mag auch keine strategietipps. Ich finde man sollte es selber durch das spielen rausfinden. Das macht Spaß . Wenn ich weiss wie es am besten zu spielen geht ist für mich persönlich das Spiel kaputt. Wo bleibt der Spaß die Herausforderung an mich selbst. Meine Feststellung sind das Spieler die sich profilieren das sie gute elo zahlen haben. Manche haben halt sonst keine Erfolge vorzuweisen. Ich gönne ihnen den billigen Erfolg

[cigma]

I find this discussion quite interesting. Thanks to Swfcdan for bringing this up!

I never thought about comparing it to sports, like frogstar_A does But I can see the point.

Personally, I don't watch out for stratgey tips when I am discovering a game. That would be like knowing your presents before Santa Claus arrives. Not much fun to me.

But later, when I learned as far as I could by myself, I am sometimes interested in reading strategy tips. Just out of curiosity or sometimes for better understanding other strategies (and playing against them). By this time, I have normally defined my own strategy. Learning other strategies to play the same game could be a challenge to explore other ways, which I consider a very good use of these tips!

In medium and heavy games the strategy tips are more likely some hints than a step-by-step instruction, because the game is too complex for that. So I think in those kinds of games you still have very much to work out yourself, even if you read some tips. Thus in my opinion, they are not such a serious game changer as others have expressed here.

In some rare cases I indeed search for tips to play better: This is when my friends like to play a game and I hate it, because I can't get the hang of it. I then start to avoid playing it. So getting some tips might help me AND my friends to have more fun together

[RobertBr]

I personally kinda wish they didn't have them, as they are so easy just to click on in game and get some ideas from. For me, part of the fun of learning games is learning strategies as you play. So I personally basically never look at them, even for games I'm experienced with, but I wonder if most people do. It feels pretty artificial being told how to play a game well as soon as you've learnt how to play it.

Its important to understand that you are objectively wrong in your assessment (not in your feelings, those are subjective and you cannot be wrong about those). You enjoy gaining insight into games (that is natural and normal) but mistakenly believe that there is choice about how that insight is gained - that either you play the game yourself and achieve some insight or you read some strategy tips and receive that insight for 'free' without the labour.

The erroneous conceptions here are several-fold. The first is a mistaken belief that strategy or tactics improve significantly the play of novice players (which almost everyone on BGA is). That is not true, internalizing the rules and minimizing unforced errors are the main drivers in a players early improvement (probably for something on the order of several hundred games). The second is that the strategy tips here are even moderately deep, they are not. Yes, a game like Pueto Rico has something on the order of 10-20,000 words of opening strategy available, but that is the exception, not the rule, and even that is not very deep (not fundamentally different to basic concepts of development and knowing a few moves of common king pawn openings in Chess).

So strategy/tactics material won't help a new player as much as you think and even if you read it you will still find a huge depth of game to explore afterwards - in fact, equipped with basic conceptual tools you will find you are much better able to develop your own insight into the game.

That is the first point, your dislike of strategy (and I know this because it is not at all uncommon and I've encountered it frequently and often with a lot of casual board gamers over several decades - its a very natural response) is misplaced. Of course, there is no imposition on you to study before you play, that is perfectly fine and it is a leisure pursuit, nobody requires you to gain qualifications before you play (the toxic cesspit that is online Hanabi excepted obviously).

There is however an important converse to your feelings, and that is games that have developed a strong playing community. Take, the quintessential example, Chess. If you pick up a basic copy of the rules of Chess those rules will also tell you that the centre of the board is important, that you should try to get your bishops and knights out early but leave your Queen for later, what a fork and pin are, that you will usually want to promote to a Queen, and probably point out scholars mate. And it is not doing that to deprive you of enjoyment, but because spending your time and effort working those things out is a bit of a waste of your time and effort - and you probably want to make more progress with the game than simply rediscovering what every intermediate junior already knows. You could play Chess without ever reading about or listening to any of that, and that is absolutely fine, most people don't even look at an openings book before they've played a few hundred games - but you won't enjoy the game as much if you steadfastly refuse to utilise that material. And you will never provide the sort of challenge that would make your play enjoyable to your opponents.

So the next tine you a strategy tip for a game you are enjoying try to read it and appreciate the genuine benefit to play of the game it represents.

P.S To the best of my knowledge the only games on USE (other than Go, Chess, and other traditional games) with any real work on strategy and tactics are Memoir 44, Unconditional Surrender, Catan, Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, and Hive (and all of those are quite superficial), I'd be interested in anyone can think of other examples.

[Meeplelowda]

Written language allowing humans to transmit knowledge about a subject forward to someone else without them starting from scratch is one of our greatest achievements. I'd think one would want to elevate the level of play as high as possible as fast as possible. It's not fun for me playing chess against someone who blunders away their queen every game.

Saying people are *supposed* to learn by making blunders is like saying you are *supposed* to learn building construction by building things that collapse, instead of, say, studying structural engineering.

[RicardoRix]

OP. I understand the point you are making. For me it's quite a dichotomy too.

The fun in learning to play a game is trying it unfold the tactics and strategies. If you are simply told how to play, then it would take away the pleasure of gaining that experience.

My best personal example of this was repeatedly playing hanabi with my brother. So many ooh aah moments, and while discussing tactics between games, we eventually come to the same conclusions on what I later found out to be the 'convention'. So if I simply read the 'convention' before hand, then we would have ruined the fun in find it out ourselves. Playing Hanabi now seems a bit robotic in comparison - still fun, but no earth shattering revelations like in the first few games. The same goes for abstract games that tend not to have written material, and talking about it, learning more little by little with friends is at-least half the fun. At the point of understanding is usually the time I get a bit bored and then move on to the next game.
For this reason, this is why I would always advise to play games with other players of the same ability.

On the other hand. I am a huge fan of reading strategy guides, once I feel ready. I also like to analyse games myself with pen and paper, sometimes spreadsheets. Getting advice and reading articles by top rated players in games is fascinating. Off the top of my head, there are is NoWonders youtube, h_illes with Century spice road, Zoras with TerraMystica, and a few youtubers with Agricola. BGG also has some excellent resources with their strategy forums. Sometimes I even read guides to games I don't even know that well just to see if there's something I missed in the gameplay.

There is a guy who talks about Feast for Odin on BGG - he's obviously quite an accomplished player, but almost all of his posts start with: Spoiler alert, you should try and find this out yourself first, but..... and then proceeds.
I kinda feel the same, I would like to make a strategy video about Lewis & Clark because I like the game so much, but then hold myself back by telling myself I shouldn't be spoiling it for others.

IRL, for beginners playing with advanced players, I would simply point out any really bad mistakes, and let them re-take their turn.

FWIW, I wrote the race for the galaxy guide here on BGA.

Not directly relevant, but I would also recommend the book, 'The art of learning' by Josh Waitzkin, former chess prodigy and a personal hero. He narrated his personal chess development in the Chess Master software. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD6gi3D ... VgB_TXvSh6

[Fletcheese]

There is no right answer here. At the end of the day we're playing games and the goal is fun. Some people find it fun to slowly discover the intricacies of a game while others have more fun playing a game at the highest level possible as quickly as possible. Telling others what they should find fun is absurd.

That being said, I will make it obvious what I find fun by linking to one of my favorite books, Play to Win by David Sirlin: https://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Sirlin draws examples mostly from fighting and card games, but the principles are easily applied to any game. One of the key takeaways imo is if you can achieve anywhere close to mastery of a game by simply reading a strategy guide, then it's not an interesting game (emphasizing this is obviously an opinion). Strategy guides should get you started thinking in the right direction, but are never a proper replacement for repeatedly playing all but the simplest games.

FWIW, I wrote the race for the galaxy guide here on BGA.

I have also written pieces of the tips for RFTG. Formulating thoughts and strategy about a game into language is something I find very fun.

TL;DR; if you don't like the tips, don't read them, but that's no reason to remove them.

[Romain672]

I wrote strategy tips on some games, maybe 10, usually very deep.

I run recently into a pretty simple game I wanted to write strategy tips on (geek out masters), I wroted at the start "Most of the fun of the game came from discovering those tips. I advice you to not read those.". It's because it's really a simple game, and I really believe that reading those would make the game a lot less enjoyable.

I've got a really deep one in Legendary Inventors, but the experience will be key. You got lots of possibilities you maybe didn't see when playing the game you can now see with my guide, but knowing when to use them or knowing what to do is still pretty hard.

On the other hand, about the cooperative game 'The crew' I'm really happy on what I wrote: https://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Tips_thecrew , it's an open game and you can be lost fastly on what is going on.
If you read those, you can have a good idea of what you can do in that game. It can be like chess, you can read what you should usually do, but you have a lot of exceptions.
And then you got a link to goes even deeper, but it's one step further.

The problem is that many games will not be like that, and spoiling the strategy can make the game a lot less interresting.

I like reading those once I got a good grasp of the strategy and plan to play competively, to see what I'm missing.