Gaming with non-gamers

I've recently had a couple of experiences with new gamers and thought I'd let you know how it went.

Over the past 12 months or so, I've been inviting my friend and his partner over, sometimes we order take-away and just watch a movie but more often than not, we end up playing a few games together. I've known them both for years and in the past he has played Warhammer, D&D and other tabletop games but recently he's been more into pc games. We play fairly light stuff like King of Tokyo, Augustus and Carcassonne and they also enjoy Citadels. He text me last week and said he'd ordered Roll For It Deluxe after seeing it on Tabletop!

My other experience is with my brother, he's not into games at all and doesn't play computer games or anything. We had a sunday lunch last week and after the desserts I broke out Timeline. It's an easy game to teach and anyone can relate to it, he's into his music and I have the music and cinema version so that went down well. Afterwards we played Skull and to my surprise after the first game he asked to play again! I don't think he's going to be turned into an overnight gamer, but we all enjoyed playing the games together so it was a good introduction. His wife won the first Timeline game and he won a couple of games of Skull and he text me the day after and said thanks and enjoyed playing because he won and he doesn't usually win anything! I think this was because he was used to the non-gamers vocabulary of Monopoly, Scrabble and Chess so playing a few more modern games where you don't have to be a 'gaming expert' to win really opened his eyes.

Hopefully there will be more gaming in the future, I'm not expecting to turn anyone into hard core gamers, but it's always a thrill to me to be able to teach a new game to someone and have them grasp the rules and then really have fun - after all, that's what it's all about!

I've had mixed success with non-gamers.
Introduced one friend with a couple of light games: Rampage and Ticket to Ride, the next time he came I suggested we could play more games (tm), his response was "Nah".

On the plus side, I've been giving my work colleague weekly updates on what I've played. It's now reached the point where he's asking to borrow games and is planning to come down one Tuesday evening.

As for my wife, she's an enigma. She's been banned from games for years for being too competitive and an awful loser. A sucker for a lost cause, I've tried introducing her to new games, primarily co-ops, as collective success & failure means I don't have to sleep on the sofa when I win a competitive game (or lose for that matter (it's complicated)). As yet, she'll only play Forbidden Desert, but has recently expressed an interest in visiting Thirsty Meeples and even the 2016 expo. There's hope yet...

Much like Paul I've had mixed success - I've gotten my nephew well into gaming (he even came to the expo this year).

My wife likes games to a point - she knows what she likes but is prone to making snap judgements and sticking with them - for example she's decided she won't play Firefly as it looks too complex for her (despite a) me pleading that its actually very simple and b) she's every bit as big a fan of the show as I am).

But on the flip side, the stuff she likes playing she loves - She bought Star Trek Catan at the expo along with a couple of different variants of Love Letter, and she enjoyed playing my copy of Formula D too. Black Fleet was a big hit with her and I think she'll really enjoy Five Tribes when we finally get a bit of time for me to teach her it

It's tricky getting people onto the habit - most folk I know fall *somewhere* on the gamer spectrum and if you can find something that piques their interest it can snowball from there (for my nephew above, it was King of Tokyo - he really enjoyed that and has steadily got into deeper and more heavy faire - he bought himself Game of Thrones at the expo - I was very proud ) but there are a few die hard "will not plays" and I generally find its best to just accept that.

My wife still pretty much refuses to play anything unless the children are involved... and then puts zero effort in. Can't chake her non-gaming (games are for kids) attitude at all.

I have however introduced a few friends to the hobby and the club and they have continued along the crazy money draining journey. I usually head for Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne as intro games.

Aneurin wrote:I usually head for Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne as intro games.

Those are both great, along with Catan - I've also found Love Letter is one that seems fairly successful atm too - that and Resistance (strange but true).

I did think Colt Express would work as an easy intro game - tried with my parents at the weekend and my mom just didn't get what was happening at all... maybe that is one just for the computer programming people out there?

Aneurin wrote:I did think Colt Express would work as an easy intro game - tried with my parents at the weekend and my mom just didn't get what was happening at all... maybe that is one just for the computer programming people out there?

Dunno, I tried a programmer friend of mine on Robo Rally once and thought I was going to melt his brain.

Played Avalon with my sister, neice, and a couple of her friends the other week. They absolutely loved it. They also really liked Catan...

I think games that are not too complex may work better with non-gamers.

I also have mixed experiences. Massive positive for me right now is my girlfriend getting into games. She hadn't played anything modern before we met, but she bought me eclipse for my half birthday this year (we do half birthdays, it's a smurf thing). From there it's snowballed massively, Shadows over Camelot is her favourite game and she loves co-ops like forbidden desert and lord of the rings and basically anything with a zombie in it. She liked Eaten by zombies, so lately i've been trying print and plays and smallish card games like sushi go and loveletter and big co-op deckbuilders like Legendary Encounters (which she asked to play immediately after we finished), just to test out a variety of games. This weekend was a big deal as she was playing jaipur, stone age, and tokaido on boardgamearena without me (I had to do some reading), so i think she's officially into games now. Might try and get her along on a Tuesday if I can give her some confidence in meeting more experienced gamers.