Every Game Needs a Player Aid

A few months ago, my wife and I went to a restaurant and sat at the bar. It was raining in Chicago that night, so the bar’s televisions that were set to broadcast a live baseball game were instead showing that channel’s rain delay broadcast—footage of an old Cubs-Reds game from 1987.

The footage was fascinating. In-between pitches, the camera panned wide to shots of fans sitting at the game, watching. Some of our fascination came from looking at fashion from the late 1980s, an article in and of itself based on some of the facial hair alone.

But the part that really snowed me about the game? In the 1980s, people went to sporting events and just…watched the game. No cell phones. No “Jumbotron”…the Cubs didn’t get a video scoreboard until 2015. (Heck, the Cubs didn’t even start playing at night until 1988, if you can believe that!)

Distraction—at least, in the form that I think of it nowadays—was not available in 1987. I think about this a lot now when I teach tabletop games to new players, because distraction is the reason why it is so difficult to teach a complex Euro to new players in 2024. But that extends to every type of game, from family-weight co-op games to trick-takers to Ameritrash dice-chuckers to Voidfall. Now that I teach almost every type of experience to both core and casual gamers on a weekly basis, I want to use this space to once again plead with publishers of all shades:

Your game needs a player aid. Don’t argue with me! I am now friendly with a number of game designers, independent marketers, and international publishers. With 99% certainty, I annually play more unique games than you do. In addition to the five regular game groups I participate in, I speak with a couple dozen different gamers regularly, who play almost as many games as I do.

And whether it’s a “tiny box” card game for families or a $300 role-playing game intended for adults featuring a 90-page rulebook, your game needs a player aid. It needs the player aid not because the game is icon-rich, nor because the game’s ruleset is overly complex for an experienced player.

All games need player aids because human beings are too distracted now, and remembering the number of available actions on a turn is best summarized with a double-sided card or sheet of paper to allow players to get some of their questions answered with a rules summary.

“Tell Me Again—What Can I Do on My Turn?”

The straw that broke the camel’s back last year—and there’s a game that does this for me every month, so don’t assume that I am picking on only this one game—was From the Moon (2024, La Boite de Jeu). From the Moon is a 1-4 player game that I would best describe as a medium-weight, sci-fi themed strategy game with elements of worker placement mechanics and area control scoring that plays in about 30 minutes per player.

From the Moon is right in the wheelhouse of a single catch-all phrase: it’s a “game of the now.” Extremely high toy factor, with rover miniatures that hold astronauts by placing standees inside cute little holding spots. One player didn’t mince words when seeing From the Moon on my table: it was “gloriously overproduced”, right down to a $89.99 price tag, which didn’t even feel high given the storage solution, player boards, building miniatures and variable player powers included in the base game.

The rulebook is good, and at 18 pages, it does most of what a good rulebook should do, with pictured examples, an icon guide near the end of the book (although not on the back cover, which we’ll come back to), and a component overview so that I can look to the front of the guide to ensure I’m using the right terms for the right pieces. In a world where the majority of rulebooks I read miss some of the key features of best practices, I was quite satisfied that the From the Moon rulebook did the trick.

But the component list was missing one key item: player aids. I immediately cursed to an empty basement; the lack of a player aid was going to add 20-30 minutes of pain to my life during my upcoming four-player game later that week.

That’s because From the Moon is a tricky teach—it’s a worker placement game, sort of. The rovers are toys that can be used to trigger actions based on the color of the astronauts inside the rover. When placed on a terrain tile, the game allows players to take a series of actions.

However, From the Moon has not one action trigger, but six. The rovers are one of those triggers. The others are actions that are simply selected by the player based on what they want to do, but remembering what those actions are proved to be a challenge for other players.

“So, I know you already covered this during the teach,” began a player on his first turn of that four-player game. “But, if I don’t move the rover, what are my choices, again?”

There is no visual reminder of the complete series of actions ANYWHERE ON THE BOARD. On a player’s personal board, there is a series of icons that tells a player what is possible, amidst a large mess of building tokens, greenhouse tiles, an area to the left of each player’s personal board that reminds them of their income actions, and to the right of a player’s board, where more actions can be triggered using a series of laboratory tiles. Even I had to admit that while none of the actions on their own is difficult, it’s a soup when adding everything together.

“All good,” I said. “So you can move the rover, you can Develop Your Team to add astronauts, you can add greenhouses to up your food production, you can add Foundations and Laboratory tiles, you can build a building, or you can pass to take back your rovers and trigger the income phase for just yourself.”

“OK, got it. How does the building thing work again?”

I took a deep breath and began to re-teach this element of the game. As you would expect, this continued for…the entire night. The teach, the re-teach, and the game took three hours and 20 minutes.

Now, I don’t necessarily blame the players here; it took me four read throughs of the rulebook before I had it all down, too. Obviously, the three other players didn’t do that because they couldn’t. But what if there was a serviceable player aid provided? So many problems go away:

• All players have a written aid to detail what their options are each round (I still can’t believe this was not included for a game of this weight)
• All players would have the detailed iconography in one place, so that they could internalize this while waiting to take their own turn instead of waiting to ask me questions on their turn (which kills off the ability for me to use my brain to take actions during my own turn)
• The income steps would allow a player to do all of this without interrupting the next player’s turn
• Final scoring, and the reminder of the end-game triggers

I teach a lot of games like From the Moon, so I’m always relieved when a more complex game gets this right—and many of the games I’ve tabled this year did get it right.

“Justin, I hear you…these heavier games need an aid. But lighter ones don’t, so—”

Wrong. WRONG. Every single game needs a player aid. The mistake many publishers make is a strange one. “The rules for my new trick-taker fit on a double-sided rulesheet, so my game doesn’t need a small card reminding players what to do.”

Yes, it does. Here’s your mistake: that players are listening intently to the 45-second rules teach for your game. They are not, because they are distracted. They are thinking about the big deliverable they have at work tomorrow. They are sweating about the birthday party they have to plan for their kid this weekend. They are looking at their cell phone, because Tik Tok is an addiction. They are regretting the date they set up for tomorrow night. They are checking the sports ticker on the TV screen behind you to see if their fantasy football TE1 scored any touchdowns today.

Remember, human beings are always thinking about something else! According to the New York Times, the average adult’s mind wanders 47% of the time. According to multiple sites I dug up for this article, the average attention span for an adult is about eight and a half seconds. In the time it took you to introduce the next topic of your teach, the average adult lost focus and missed something you just said.

That means a lot of players missed the part about how turns work in the supposedly simple game you are teaching right now. I taught a party game called Slingz to a group of seven other adults over the summer. The teach would have taken about two minutes if I just read the rules from the rulesheet.

In reality, it took me eight minutes to teach the game. That’s because players were so distracted that they missed many basic parts of the design, in a game that required almost zero experience playing any kind of game to understand. I kept getting questions for a game that could be played by almost anyone.

With a player aid, players can re-center and catch up on how to play the game between turns.

A Wild Array of Games, A Wild Array of Players

In the week leading up to my play of From the Moon, here’s what else hit my table across plays with my wife, my two kids, my Monday review group, my Wednesday casual game night group, the guys that came over to try From the Moon, and a one-off play night with my strategy game group:

• Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory (complex political-social hand management and negotiation game)
• SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (heavy strategy Euro)
• Megaland (family-weight “push your luck” game)
• Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering (medium-weight rondel game)
• Scatter Brain (kid-weight math and dice “slap” game)
• Flatiron (lightweight, two-player-only city building game)
• Nucleum: Australia (heavy strategy Euro)
• Fuego (family-weight trick-taking game)

Hegemony and SETI feature some of the best player aids I have ever seen in a board game. The SETI player aid, per my review, is my current standard bearer for what a player aid should be. Everything you need is there, in a very compact format, featuring details on how rounds end and details on the milestone scoring at the end of the game. Each time a player had questions during my plays of SETI, I referred them to the player aid—in all but one case, the question was answered by the aid. Nucleum: Australia (as well as the Nucleum base game) also has a solid player aid.

But many of the above games are heavier, more strategic, more complicated experiences, so the inclusion of a player aid is not a surprise. The mistake I see lately is when a company publishes a supposedly simple card game and does not include a player aid.

The Fuego player aid isn’t great, but it does detail the basics of a round on a simple double-side card the size of a poker card. That did eliminate some of the questions that popped up during my three review plays.

The other games—Megaland, Scatter Brain, Flatiron, and Kraftwagen—have no player aid at all. Megaland and Kraftwagen use the back of their respective rulebooks to answer some questions, and in the case of Kraftwagen, that was a big help. Flatiron badly needs player aids, but I have a feeling the publishers decided that for a two-player-only game that also plays solo, the two players can just share the manual. (That was a mistake, because it is too icon-heavy.)

Trust Me, Your Game Needs a Player Aid

Just prior to posting this review, I did a day of Lacerda games with a friend—we played The Gallerist and Kanban EV, two of my favorites. Both games have great player aids, necessary in part because both are more complex experiences. I also played Disney Villainous: Sugar and Spite, and even though it’s a lot easier to teach, it still provides a player aid and a character guide for players to understand their personal goals. Fishing is a slightly more complex trick-taker that hit my table around the same time, and it wisely includes a player aid.

In the same month, I also played The White Castle: Matcha. It needs a player aid. Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon is just as complex as The Gallerist…it needs a player aid. Flower Fields is a light, quick tile-laying game…it needs a player aid. Castle Combo is even lighter than Flower Fields, a very short tableau builder with only nine turns. There’s a game aid for all players, so the core of what a player needs is there, but there’s only one aid to share amongst the table.

Little Alchemists is an excellent family-weight deduction game. It needs a player aid. Stephens is a medium-weight Euro that thought it could get away with a small player aid tile featuring icons that represent the possible actions for a player on their turn. That was one of the strangest decisions of the year, because the player aids there are useless.

So what does best-in-class look like? A small part of this depends on the weight of the game; Lisboa has a player aid so long it looks like a menu to a high-concept Italian restaurant. But nearly everything is there, and that’s the goal. This is why I think SETI’s player aid is the best thing I saw in 2024—EVERYTHING is there, and that aid kills off a lot of questions before they ever escape the mouth of another player.

Other great examples from 2024: Arcs, with a player aid that essentially turns its rulebook into a four-page booklet. Salton Sea uses a clever mechanic for its player aid: it details all the game’s actions and icons on a double-sided card, but lists the specific page number in the main rulebook for each action if a player has more detailed questions.

The Gang is scaled perfectly to the weight of the game. Each player is given a card that provides details on the round structure, with a separate card that reminds players of the different rankings for a poker hand, incredibly helpful for players who have never played poker before. Some games don’t provide a personal player aid at all…in games like Station to Station, the player aid is simply printed on the bottom third of the main board for all players to see.

No matter what format it takes, I really hope the tabletop ecosystem embraces what I see on a consistent basis—that no matter how complex a game is, players are always looking for a reminder of how a game plays and how it is scored. Do your customers a favor and provide more player aids in the future!