Learning Board Games: I Interview a Newbie About the Line on the Pain/Reward Graph

As a lot of board gamers who defaulted to solo mode when their friends refused to play have found out, the avoidance of the unknown and the learning curve is real.

Contributing writer Fritz Godard had never engaged with a solo dungeon crawler before 52 Realms: Adventures and writing this account of his struggles with the experience.

This was fascinating for me, as I love strategy and hobby games, but still hate learning them. I called him up so we could compare notes about the process of getting over the hump of confronting new systems and hitting the payoff.

We talked about the pleasure vs. pain of learning new stuff, what we saw as a reviewer’s responsibility, and I also asked for his help in trapping/killing some kind of wight or will-o-wisp on my property now that he’s a big, tough dungeon adventurer. Hit Play below to hear our chat.