9.29 - perspective of a new player

Now that we have spent the last six weeks cultivating our game design toolkit, Dr. S assigned us to our first big project group, where we were tasked with creating a card game. We played two card games this week - Sushi Go and The Crew to get to know each other and get in the appropriate headspace.

On Tuesday, my group played, or tried to play, The Crew. Dr. S showed us a YouTube video that went over the rules and gameplay, but if anything, that video may have just confused me even more once I got to actually reading the rule book. Mind you, the rule book should really be called a rule encyclopedia, but I digress. Essentially, the premise of The Crew is rooted in space mission themed trick-taking, a term and action I was completely unfamiliar with. During this trick-taking, certain tasks are to be completed in a certain order by a certain player. 

Looking back at my experience learning and playing The Crew, I realize that if the concept of trick-taking wasn’t so foreign to me, I probably could have caught on way faster. That style of play wasn’t popular in my childhood, and seemingly, the lives of others in the class. This experience introduces an interesting and integral consideration - rule writing. Sitting at 22 pages, The Crew’s rule book is definitely not lacking any information. James Ernest notes in Writing Effective Rules, that people prefer reading in small chunks, regardless of the length of the rules. However, I say that the overall length should be regarded as well. Ernest also mentions the importance of riding the wave between too little and too much detail in rules. As a new player, opening up the rule book for The Crew was pretty intimidating. Then, to read the rules, all 22 pages, and still be confused is borderline insulting to my intelligence. This is not to say that The Crew is overcomplicated as a game itself, which is not the case. And I also don’t think that the game rules should be changed; rather, they should be reformatted and simplified. 

To avoid this from happening in my group’s game, I will stress the importance of the “perspective of a new player” (Ernest, 2021). Keeping this in mind should mitigate some of the confusion that could arise when learning a new game.

Ernest, J. (2021). Writing Effective Rules. In Games on Paper (IP). essay. Retrieved from https://bschweizer.com/share/Ernest-Writing+Effective+Rules.pdf.