Write the Five-Minute Teach Script

Most people teach a game the way they would give directions to a friend’s house: from memory, out loud, adding details as they occur to them. The details pile up. The teach that felt like three minutes in your head takes twelve at the table.

A script fixes that. Not a speech you read word for word, but one page that holds the order of your teach and, just as important, the things you have decided not to say. The Five-Minute Teach Script in the toolkit gives you the page. This lesson shows you how to fill it.

The six fields

• Theme sentence. Who you are and what you want, in one breath.
• Win sentence. How the game ends and who wins.
• The turn. What you do on a turn, in the order you do it, written as things you will point at.
• The gotcha. The one rule that surprises people. Only one.
• What to skip. The rules you will hold back until they come up.
• The first-round plan. How round one will run, and one move you can steer your guest toward.

The first four are what you say. The last two are what you decide. Most teaches run long because nobody made those decisions in advance, so every rule felt like it had to be said now.

Your solo run from the last lesson feeds this page. Your biggest stumble usually becomes the gotcha. The smaller ones go into the turn, or into the skip list.

A worked example: Carcassonne

Here is a finished script for Carcassonne, without farmers, as the rulebook suggests for a first game. Read it and notice how little is on it.

• Theme: “We are building a medieval landscape together, one tile at a time, and competing to get credit for its roads, cities and monasteries.”
• Win: “When the last tile goes down, the game ends. Most points wins.”
• The turn: “Draw a tile. Place it so every edge matches: road to road, city to city, grass to grass. Then you may put one of your people on that tile. If your tile finished something, it scores now and your person comes home.”
• The gotcha: “You cannot put a person on a road or city someone already claimed, even if their person is three tiles away.”
• Skip: farmers, the river and abbot, final scoring of unfinished features, what happens when two cities join, the tile that fits nowhere.
• First round: “Everyone plays face up and thinks out loud. Watch for a short road someone can finish on their first or second turn, and point at it.”

Notice what the skip list does. Merged cities and unfinished scoring are real rules, and some will come up tonight. You will teach each one when it happens, in a sentence, with the tiles in front of everyone. Before then, they are just weight.

Notice also the first-round plan. A short road closed early scores a few points and sends the meeple straight home. That is the newcomer’s first win, and the teacher has planned it before the box was opened.

Rehearse it out loud, with a timer

Reading a script silently tells you nothing. You speak slower than you read, you add little phrases, and you pause to pick up pieces. So stand at the table, set a timer, and say the first four fields aloud while moving real pieces.

Then look at the clock. Over five minutes is common the first time. Cut in this order:

1. Any rule a newcomer will not need in round one. Move it to the skip list.
2. Any second example. One shown turn is enough.
3. Any reason or tip. “This is good because…” is strategy, and strategy waits.
4. Repeated words. “So basically what you’re going to want to do” becomes “You.”

Read it again. Keep cutting until it fits with a little room to spare, since a real table adds questions.

Keep the page by the box

The finished script lives with the game. Fold it into the box lid. Next month, when a friend says “teach us that one,” you will not rebuild the teach from memory. You will read one page, rehearse it once, and be ready in ten minutes.

Over time your scripts become a shelf of their own. That shelf is what makes you the person everyone wants to learn games from.