Is There A Secret to Explaining Complicated Board Games?

Jun 14, 2025

Having to explain the rules to a board game is always a drag. You’ve invited your friends over, they’re excited to start playing something, but now they have to sit through a short lecture. You can see them fidgeting while you drone on. You wonder whether you should have picked something simpler like Go Fish. Inevitably, somebody suggests that the group starts playing and everyone can learn as they go.

Your job, as the person explaining the rules, is to be as concise as you can. Listening to someone explain the rules badly is apparently such a chore that most people would rather play the game without understanding it.

So the pressure is extreme. But it’s easy to go wrong. I’ve caught myself mid-explanation talking about some minor rule when I haven’t even explained the central goal of the game yet, and I’ll know that I’ve made a fatal error. Because now people are confused and are asking questions and I have to backtrack. I’ve lost momentum.

Is there a way to do better? Is there a secret to explaining board game rules well?

That there could be a secret to explaining complicated rules excites me. This isn’t just about board games. This is about communication! This is about how best to explain complicated systems of any kind. If there’s a method for successfully explaining even the most complicated board game to your friends within five minutes (while they only give you half of their attention because the pizza just arrived), then surely that same method would apply to explaining complicated code, or a scientific theory, or something really truly inscrutable, like whatever it is that private equity firms do.

Probably there are many things that determine how effective an explanation is. But I want to focus on the question I always find myself asking—Where do I start? Do I start with the overall goal of the game and then work backward to the fundamental components? This has the benefit of opening with what most players care about. But then I’m also in danger of saying something like, “the goal of the game is to collect the most glarks in your flooble-waffle.” My explanation has run ahead of the definitions I need to communicate. Should I instead start by explaining what a glark is? Will my audience care about glarks if they don’t know why they matter?

To figure this out, I’ve made three different attempts at explaining the rules to Coup, a relatively simple bluffing game. Each explanation presents the fundamentals of the game in a different order. The exercise showed me that this choice of how to order concepts in an explanation matters. The last explanation of the three is the clearest because concepts are introduced in an order that minimizes how much players have to hold in their heads at once.

If you aren’t already familiar with Coup, I hope you’re prepared to learn how to play it three times over. No fidgeting, please.

How to Play Coup: From The Bottom Up

This explanation starts with the core concepts of the game and works its way up to the overall goal.

Coup is a game of deception played using a deck of just 15 cards. Each card represents a character belonging to a futuristic, neofeudal royal court. The characters come in five types (Duke, Assassin, Ambassador, Contessa, and Captain). There are three cards of each type in the deck.

Each player begins the game with two randomly dealt character cards in his or her hand representing that player’s influence at the court. Each player also begins the game with two coins.

On each player’s turn, he or she chooses to take one of seven actions. Some actions are free while others are associated with a cost and can only be chosen if the player has sufficient coins to pay the cost. An action may also be associated with a character type. If an action is associated with a character type, then a player must claim to have a card of that character type in his or her hand when taking the action. The player can be telling the truth or lying.

When a player claims to have a particular card, any other player can choose to challenge the claim. The player who made the claim must then prove that he or she has the card (by showing it). If the player was lying, the action is blocked and he or she must forfeit a card of his or her choosing. Any coins the player paid in order to take the action are refunded. If the player was telling the truth, he or she first shuffles the revealed card back into the deck, draws a replacement, then proceeds with the action; the challenger must forfeit a card instead.

At any time during play, in response to any other player’s action, a player may choose to take a counteraction that blocks the original action. Counteractions are always free but also always require making a claim that can be challenged. If a counteraction succeeds, then the original player’s action is blocked.

Whenever a player forfeits or otherwise loses a card, that player is said to have lost influence. When this happens, the player must put the lost card face-up in front of them.

When a player has lost all influence, he or she has lost the game. The last player left with any influence has taken control of the court and has won the game.

The thing I most appreciate about this ordering is that everything feels manageable throughout. As I read it, something about starting by pointing out there are just 15 cards in the deck, then explaining exactly what each player starts with, gives me a comforting sense that my mind is wrapped around the whole of Coup (at least as explained so far) at each step.

A drawback is that the definitions at each step lack context. I could easily imagine a player saying, “Okay, so we have two coins to start, but what does that mean? Am I starting rich or am I starting poor? Should I spend my coins freely or conserve them?” Every rule is explained in terms of definitions that have already been given, but can players really know what something is unless they also know what it’s for? We are also asking our players to remember a lot of information without giving them any way to triage—we haven’t told them how important anything is.

Maybe instead we could start with what we know matters to our audience.

How to Play Coup: Top-Down

This explanation goes in reverse order. We start with the goal of the game and work down toward the fundamentals.

Coup is a game of deception in which players compete to take control of a futuristic, neofeudal royal court. Whenever a player forfeits or otherwise loses a card from his or her hand, that player is said to have lost influence at court. The last player with any cards in his or her hand is the winner.

Players can force their opponents to lose cards by catching them in a lie. If a player suspects an opponent is lying, he or she can challenge that opponent. If the challenged player cannot prove that he or she was telling the truth, then he or she must choose a card to forfeit. But if the challenged player was telling the truth, then the player who made the challenge must forfeit a card instead.

Players can only be challenged when they make a claim. Players make a claim when they do something in the game that they should only be able to do if they are holding a particular card. When a player claims to have a particular card and is challenged, he or she must prove it by revealing the card, shuffling it back into the deck, and drawing a replacement.

If a player is not certain that an opponent is lying, he or she might instead opt to counteract the opponent by blocking the opponent’s turn. Since counteraction requires certain cards, a player must make a claim to block an opponent’s turn. This claim can be challenged by any other player.

On each player’s turn, he or she chooses to take one of seven actions. Some actions are free while others are associated with a cost and can only be chosen if the player can pay the cost. An action may also be associated with a certain card. If an action is associated with a card , then a player must claim to have that card his or her hand when taking the action. Some but not all actions can be counteracted by other players.

Each player begins the game with two randomly dealt cards representing that player’s influence over two members of the court. Each player also begins the game with two coins. The coins are used to pay the cost associated with some actions. If a player pays for an action but is blocked or challenged, the player gets his or her coins back.

There are 15 total cards in the deck, with three card of each character type (Duke, Assassin, Ambassador, Contessa, and Captain). Each character type is associated with different actions and counteractions.

Writing this explanation of the rules was difficult. I tried to stick to a reversed order, but that led to having to explain counteractions before actions. Going top-down, it’s hard to be specific until the end of the explanation. Many rules are explained in terms of general “cards” and “costs”, relying on a player’s familiarity with other board games to avoid confusion until the details can be filled in.

I was surprised by how this explanation feels so different from the previous one. It’s more antagonistic, focusing on the ways a player can harm his or her opponents. It charges forward. It’s an explanation for someone who is here to win. It also is more in keeping with the setting of Coup. We start with a quest for control rather than a dry taxonomy of card types.

Still, I’m left with the sense that this explanation has to charge forward because stopping at any point would just lead to a million questions. Imagine if we had stopped just after the second paragraph. Because we introduce the idea that players can lie before explaining what they can lie about, someone hearing the explanation might be left with the idea that you’re supposed to ask your opponents invasive personal questions and call them out when you think they are lying to cover up something they are embarrassed to admit. That would be a very different game!

How to Play Coup: The Sandwich

Is there a way that we could combine the two approaches we’ve explored so far and enjoy the benefits of both? I think there is.

We can begin at the top with what a player will care most about—how to win. Then we can dive down to the bottom, building our way back up as painstakingly as we like now that we have given our audience a reason to care.

Coup is a game of deception in which players compete to take control of a futuristic, neofeudal royal court. Each player starts with influence over two members of the court. Players can reduce their opponents’ influence by assassinating their opponents’ courtiers or by catching their opponents in lies. The last player left with any influence at court is the winner.

Coup is played using a deck of just 15 cards. Each card represents a character belonging to the court. The characters come in five types (Duke, Assassin, Ambassador, Contessa, and Captain). There are three cards of each type in the deck.

Each player begins the game with two randomly dealt character cards in his or her hand representing that player’s influence at the court. Each player also begins the game with two coins.

On each player’s turn, he or she chooses to take one of seven actions. Some actions are free while others are associated with a cost and can only be chosen if the player has sufficient coins to pay the cost. An action may also be associated with a character type. If an action is associated with a character type, then a player must claim to have a card of that character type in his or her hand when taking the action. The player can be telling the truth or lying.

When a player claims to have a particular card, any other player can choose to challenge the claim. The player who made the claim must then prove that he or she has the card (by showing it). If the player was lying, the action is blocked and he or she must forfeit a card of his or her choosing. Any coins the player paid in order to take the action are refunded. If the player was telling the truth, he or she first shuffles the revealed card back into the deck, draws a replacement, then proceeds with the action; the challenger must forfeit a card instead.

At any time during play, in response to any other player’s action, a player may choose to take a counteraction that blocks the original action. Counteractions are always free but also always require making a claim that can be challenged. If a counteraction succeeds, then the original player’s action is blocked.

Whenever a player forfeits or otherwise loses a card, that player is said to have lost influence. When this happens, the player must put the lost card face-up in front of them.

When a player has lost all of his or her cards, that player has lost the game. The last player left with any cards has taken control of the court and has won the game.

Of all the explanations I think this one does the best job of answering questions as soon as they arise. At each step in the explanation our audience is safely ensconced in a sandwich of context and definitions. We have the context above and the definitions below. Any questions that players might have are therefore likely just to be about the very next thing we will explain.

The Pyramid Principle

My own little exercise has shown me that I like the “sandwich” method best. But surely other people have come up with other methods, probably ones with better names? There are lots of style guides and books on how to write well out there, but are there any books specifically about this question of how to order information in expository writing?

I did find such a book. It’s called The Pyramid Principle. It was written by a McKinsey consultant, Barbara Minto, in the ’80s, for other consultants and business people who have to write memos and directives but aren’t good at it.

Minto is unequivocal—top-down is the best way. “The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized,” she says. But she doesn’t mean top-down in the way that I’ve meant it.

Minto says that the best way to structure any piece of expository writing is to structure it as a pyramid. Ideas at the same level of abstraction belong at the same level in the pyramid. When it comes to ordering your ideas, she says you should start at the top and then work your way down. But that doesn’t mean you have to explain every single idea at one level before you are allowed to move further down. Instead, she says you can move along a level, explaining each idea and any supporting ideas at a lower level in turn.

If Minto had been a software engineer instead of a consultant, maybe she would have said that you need to do a pre-order traversal of the tree of ideas in your pyramid. My top-down explanation of Coup’s rules above was instead a level-order traversal.

I’m not going to explain the rules of Coup a fourth time, but structured as a pyramid that explanation might look like this:

If we follow Minto’s advice, we’d start at the top, giving players context and a reason to care. But then as we move down we’d have an opportunity to explain influence and characters in one go, which on reflection makes more sense than explaining the character cards and coins before moving upward. We leave aside coins until we have an opportunity to explain what actions are first.

Minto says that the pyramid strategy is effective because it minimizes the demands on the reader’s working memory. Humans have trouble holding more than five or six unrelated ideas in their heads at the same time. The pyramid strategy ensures that, at any level in the pyramid, we are focused on one main idea and a handful of supporting ideas. If we want to move up the pyramid to consider more ideas, we first have to synthesize the supporting ideas into one idea that becomes a supporting idea for the next main idea further up the pyramid.

The “sandwich” explanation of Coup’s rules, while it didn’t follow the pyramid structure exactly and could be improved, was most effective because it came closest to the pyramid structure. We tried to minimize the number of unrelated ideas a player has to hold in her or her head by opening with a context that related the ideas to follow (“this is how you win”) and then building up from the bottom so that no term was left undefined and sitting around in the reader’s mind with a big question mark next to it.

I’m persuaded by Minto’s book. I want somebody to write a version of her book for software engineers. We live in a world where the amount of code written every day is growing and growing and our main problem is trying to understand it all. We need to be able to communicate effectively with each other, in prose and in code. It occurs to me that maybe the pyramid principle could even be applied to the design of modules and the dependency tree connecting them in a codebase.

In any case, I hope my many explanations of Coup have convinced you that how you structure an explanation makes a big difference to how well you will be understood. Perhaps in a world where we all took that lesson to heart we’d have a cognitive dividend to spend on better software—and more complicated board games.