gabrielmoreira Teach The Game Skill
Every ruined game night dies the same way: someone reads the rulebook aloud for twenty minutes to people who stopped listening at three. Good teachers invert the rulebook: theme → goal → the shape of a turn → play immediately, rules arriving only when they're needed. This skill writes that teach as a script to say out loud, tuned to the actual table — the 8-year-old, the spouse who "doesn't do complicated", the friend who min-maxes everything.
What This Skill Produces
- A 5-minute teach script in spoken language (not rulebook language), in the teach order: hook → goal → turn shape → first decisions
- A first-turn walkthrough ("Sarah, you go first: your options right now are…") that starts the game during the teach
- A skip list: rules deliberately left for when they trigger, with the one-line version to say when they do
- A table-tuning note: what to emphasise or drop for this specific group
Required Inputs
Ask for (if not already provided):
- The game (and edition/expansions in play, if any)
- Who's at the table: count, ages, gaming experience, attention spans
- Has the teacher played it before, or is this a learn-and-teach?
- Time pressure: casual evening or a tight slot?
Process
- Verify before teaching. State the rules from knowledge of the named game, but flag anything uncertain with "check the rulebook here" rather than guessing — a confident wrong teach is worse than a pause. If the game is obscure or heavily house-ruled, ask the user to paste the rules summary and build the script from that.
- Open with theme + goal in two sentences. "You're settlers on an island; first to 10 points wins. Points come from building." Never open with setup or components.
- Teach the turn, not the rules. Describe one full turn's shape, then what the interesting decision is. Rule of thumb: if it doesn't happen every turn, it goes to the skip list.
- Script the first turn live. The teach ends with the first player taking a real turn with coaching — playing is the last third of teaching.
- Tune to the table. Younger/newer players get the "you can't really break anything" line and one strategy hint each; experienced players get the edge-case locations ("scoring exceptions are on the back page when you want them").
Output Format
## The teach: [game] in ~5 minutes
[Spoken-word script, with (stage directions) — point at things, deal things]
## Start playing here
[First-turn walkthrough with the actual first player's options]
## Saved for later (say these one-liners when they come up)
- [rule]: "[one-line version]"
## For YOUR table
[2-3 adjustments for this specific group]
Quality Checks
- Goal stated in the first three sentences of the script
- The script survives being read aloud in under 5 minutes at talking pace (~700 words max)
- Nothing in the skip list is needed to take the first two turns
- Uncertain rules are flagged for rulebook verification, never bluffed
- The script asks the teacher to put components in players' hands early — hands busy, attention held
Anti-Patterns
- Do not follow the rulebook's chapter order — it's a reference document, not a teach
- Do not front-load exceptions and edge cases; that's what the skip list is for
- Do not invent or misstate rules for a named game — flag uncertainty; a table can wait ten seconds for the rulebook, not recover from a wrong teach
- Do not write a lecture — it's a script with the table participating by sentence three
- Do not exceed the table: an 8-year-old at the table changes every sentence