The Solo Run

You cannot teach a game from the rulebook. You can only teach it from your head. And the fastest way to get a game into your head is not to read the rules three times. It is to read them once and then play, alone, before anyone else sees you fumble.

That is the solo run. It takes about half an hour, and it does two jobs. It lets you teach without the book. And it hands you a list of the exact spots where your friends will get lost.

The five steps

1. Read the rules once, start to finish. Do not study. Do not take notes. Just get the shape of the game.
2. Set up from the book. Follow the setup steps as written, for two players. Setup is where most rulebooks hide their first surprises.
3. Play three turns from both seats. Take a turn as yourself, then walk to the other side of the table and take a turn as your future guest. Say each move out loud, using “you.”
4. Watch one how-to-play video. Do this after the turns, not before. Now the video is a check, not a lecture: you will notice the moment it does something differently from you.
5. Write down your stumbles. Every pause, every flip back to the rulebook, every “wait, can I do that?” goes on the list.

Playing both seats matters more than it sounds. From your own chair you see the board the way you will during the teach. From the other chair you see it the way your guest will, upside down, with the score track on the far side. Some confusions only show up from there.

A worked example: Azul alone

Picture a solo run of Azul. You read the rules, put out five factory displays for two players, and fill each with four tiles from the bag. So far, so good.

Turn one: you take three blue tiles and want to put them in your top pattern line. That line holds one tile. You stop and check the book. The rest goes to the floor line, and each floor space costs points. That is stumble number one: the floor line. A newcomer will not see it coming, because grabbing more tiles looks like a good thing.

Round one ends and you move a finished line to your wall. You reach to place the blue tile in an empty space you like, then realize you do not get to choose: on the standard side, each row of the wall has one fixed space for each color, set in diagonals. That is stumble number two: the wall pattern. A newcomer will plan a line in a color that row of the wall already holds, which the rules do not allow.

Then you score that tile. You count its row, then its column, and you get a different number from the one you expected. Stumble number three: counting both directions.

Three stumbles, all found in twenty minutes, none of them visible from the rulebook alone. Now you know what your teach needs to show with real tiles, and what it can skip.

Why the stumbles fade so fast

Here is the trap. The moment you understand the floor line, it stops feeling confusing. By tomorrow you will not remember that it ever was. That is the curse of knowledge: once you know something, it is very hard to imagine not knowing it.

So the list has to be written while the confusion is fresh. Write it within the hour, and write each stumble as the question you asked yourself, not as the answer. “Where does the extra blue go?” is more useful than “excess tiles go to the floor line,” because it is the question your guest will be asking too.

Turn the list into a plan

Each stumble on your list gets one of three treatments in the teach:

• Show it. The big ones, the rules that cost points or break a turn, get shown with real pieces during the turn demo. In Azul that is the floor line.
• Say it when it happens. Rules that matter later, like counting both directions when scoring, can wait until the first wall tile goes down. Then you count it together, out loud.
• Drop it. Some stumbles were yours alone, from reading too fast. If a newcomer would never trip there, cut it.

Three stumbles is a good number. Fewer and you probably read too carefully. More and the game may be too heavy for tonight, which is worth knowing too.