Teaching a New Player Guards of Atlantis, and Losing Badly

A friend of the Thursday group brought her partner along a few weeks back, someone who’d never played anything heavier than a party game, and asked what we had that could handle a fourth player who’d never sat at this kind of table before. I said Guards of Atlantis II, because it was already out, and then remembered, about four turns into teaching it, exactly why that was a mistake.

The whole design assumes you know what every hero on the table can do. That’s not a flaw, I’ve said as much in a review here, it’s the honest cost of translating a genre built on information asymmetry onto cardboard. But teaching it live, in real time, to someone whose only frame of reference was the character sheet in front of them, meant I was constantly interrupting my own explanation to warn her about abilities she had no way to anticipate. Watch out, that one can do this. That card looks passive but isn’t. I could hear myself doing it and knew it wasn’t landing as helpful, it was landing as a stream of caveats to someone already trying to hold the base rules in her head.

She lost badly, predictably, to someone who’d read every card at the table beforehand, and I felt genuinely bad about it in a way I don’t usually feel about a game outcome. Not because losing is bad, losing is fine, that’s not the complaint. It’s that the loss wasn’t really about a decision she made. It was about information she structurally couldn’t have had, and there’s a difference between those two kinds of losing that I think matters more than we usually admit at a game table.

What I’ve taken from it, and I did apologize afterward, more directly than I usually bother to, is that some games are honestly not first-game material regardless of how clean the core rules are, and I should have said so upfront instead of assuming enthusiasm would carry a rough first session. She was gracious about it, said it went well and it seemed like the day was going pretty good until that final round, which I took as more generous than I probably deserved. I’ve since started keeping a mental short list, games I won’t teach cold to a genuinely new player no matter how much I want to show them off. Guards of Atlantis is at the top of it now.