Do you guys believe in gateway games?

Gateway games do not exist. It is elitism in full bloom

I one played "Puerto Rico" with a guy from Puerto Rico who was not a gamer. He had no problem understanding the game or strategies.

He said the game was a little slow

Video games are a fairly close parallel to board games, no? (I figure gamers are gamers are gamers, no matter what their stripes.) Now, how many of those non-gamers who bought a Wii for Wii Sports went on to buy Metroid? At most, they'd pick up one or maybe two other games, and most likely that included Wii Fit.

I don't see why board games would be any different. If I forced Catan on my family, they're sure as shit not going to have Agricola on their shelf next time I visit.

Bullwinkle wrote:

There is no such thing as a gateway game. In other news, Santa Claus does not exist.

Wha?!?!?! Just a second... Santa?

OMG!!!!!!!

ubarose wrote:

Yes. Candyland. It teaches the three most important abstract concepts of AmeriTrash games.

This is your dude.

This is the map.

This is your dude on the map.

After someone gets those concepts down, you can move onto Descent.

I have to agree with this. I'm currently using Candyland to indoctrinate my 3 year old in the way of the boardgame. We've also played Ludo and Snakes and Ladders quite a bit, but she doesn't get these games yet. Candyland she gets.

Ken B. wrote:

I don't believe there are gateway games. Not in the traditional sense that people talk about them.


There are games with low barriers to entry, sure. I'll buy that.


But I can attest from personal experience that such games do not "lead" anywhere--it's a gateway, alright, but the portal is closed. It never goes beyond that easy, low barrier of entry level for a lot of people who try games out.


You know what? That's perfectly fine. People should play what they like. But the idea of a "gateway game" hooking someone in, leading them deeper, where they start with Ticket to Ride and then end up one day running a Road to Legend campaign...well, that is an absolute myth.

Well, that's how I got started. Hahaha. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne, and now we're thinking about running an RtL campaign, but I guess that's not the point.

I have to admit that I almost always start new players with Catan or TTR. Not because I think they're dumb, it's a matter of them not wanting to try any game longer than an hour. Most of my friends have short attention spans. Sooner or later, we bring them into a game of Descent, and then all is well.

Think maybe I'll just go with a short Descent dungeon or something from now on.

Wow, kookoobah, I stand corrected. I'd never seen it happen, m'self.

I'm willing to bet though...that you, or one of your friends, would have been just fine jumping straight into Descent. You were "wired" for it already, so to speak. I can totally see that, too.

ubarose wrote:

Yes. Candyland. It teaches the three most important abstract concepts of AmeriTrash games.

This is your dude.

This is the map.

This is your dude on the map.


After someone gets those concepts down, you can move onto Descent.

One notch higher up the list girl.

Sag.

There's no "believing" in gateway games. They exist. Nobody's ever noticed that, for most people, the games that "got them into gaming" tend to be the same handful of games? Either it's the Gamemaster stuff, some of the more mainstream GW games like Heroquest, M:tG, or nowadays TtR, SoC, Carcassonne, and the like. I'll bet anything that a serious, reliable survery would confirm this.

They're the games that are easy to get, are a bit cheaper, and have at least a little more name recognition. Just like gateway drugs. Most drug users do not go from a life of complete sobriety to hard drugs like heroin. There's almost always something in between like booze, or weed; cheaper stuff that's easier to get ahold of.

Now, even if you smoke 10 bongs a day, there's no guarantee that you'll move up to the hard stuff, but the likelihood is certainly greater. It doesn't always "work" with board games either, but that doesn't change the fact that it does happen, a lot.

If you're picking a game to play with friends or family who normally don't play these things, trying to find something that will make gamers out of them is pointless. Pick something that you think they'll have fun with, and don't worry about whether or not they'll ever play a game with you again. That's not important, and anything you pick will likely fail for this purpose anyway. I usually pick things like Ca$h n' Gun$, Family Business, or Mall of Horror; things without a whole lot of "game" to get in the way of us just hanging out and having fun.

Ken B. wrote:

Wow, kookoobah, I stand corrected. I'd never seen it happen, m'self.

I'm willing to bet though...that you, or one of your friends, would have been just fine jumping straight into Descent. You were "wired" for it already, so to speak. I can totally see that, too.

you are probably correct. that fateful day, i was actually just innocently playing a flash version of risk online, and i figured hey, why not grab a real life risk boardgame, and then i went to google, and one thing led to another and i found myself on BGG looking at lists of the best gateway games and ordering TTR and Carcassonne and Catan that same day.

you could say i took a detour.

mjl1783 wrote:

There's no "believing" in gateway games. They exist. Nobody's ever noticed that, for most people, the games that "got them into gaming" tend to be the same handful of games? Either it's the Gamemaster stuff, some of the more mainstream GW games like Heroquest, M:tG, or nowadays TtR, SoC, Carcassonne, and the like. I'll bet anything that a serious, reliable survery would confirm this.

They're the games that are easy to get, are a bit cheaper, and have at least a little more name recognition. Just like gateway drugs. Most drug users do not go from a life of complete sobriety to hard drugs like heroin. There's almost always something in between like booze, or weed; cheaper stuff that's easier to get ahold of.

I'd say that those are the games that the people who were already gamers at heart got into
because of the reasons you list, but they didn't magically "create" gamers out of people who weren't built that way to begin with.

What "Gateway" games provide is an overlap between gamers and non-gamers. They can be enjoyed by both groups because they are usually simple but also have some decision making built in. The people in your group who move on to much more complicated games were already gamers at heart and could have jumped straight in to something complex and enjoyed it. I know of a couple of groups in my area who started out with Twilight Imperium 3. They didn't have to learn gaming concepts through simpler games.

Most of the people you play "gateway" games with will never move beyond those games because they're not gamers. They enjoy the games because those games appeal to non-gamers.

"Gateway" games exist, but they are mis-named because they don't necessarily lead to anything. If it seems like they inspire interest in gaming in a couple of people in your group, it's because those people were already gamers at heart. I own several "gateway" games, not to create gamers, but to weed them out of the crowd.

"Gateway" games exist, but they are mis-named because they don't necessarily lead to anything.

Gateway drugs, from which the gaming concept gets its name, don't necessarily lead to anything either. It's not a misnomer, it's a analogue. They don't have to lead to something every time for the analogy to work.

If it seems like they inspire interest in gaming in a couple of people in your group, it's because those people were already gamers at heart.

Well, until scientists can isolate the board gaming gene in humans, this statement is, right or wrong, of zero value for practical purposes. It doesn't matter if someone who played Risk, or Axis & Allies, then moved on to TI:3 could have been happy just jumping straight into TI:3 because they were already a gamer at heart. They didn't do it. And, until I see TI:3 in the same number of retail stores as the other two, I'm going to go ahead and assume not many other people do either.

Being a gamer at heart is all well and good, being a gamer at the table, and at the sales counter, is where it actually matters.

I agree with others that you can't expect to introduce a certain game to anyone and expect them to suddenly become a raging board game addict. I do find that Pandemic makes a great "go to" game to play with people who aren't really hobby gamers. My wife and I have brought that out and played with several different people that we've met on our travels, many of whom don't really play anything more involved than Pictionary and Scrabble... and almost without exception they all picked it right up, were very involved and invested in the game, and eagerly asked to play it again.

But did any of those people sign up on TOS and rush out to buy a bunch of hobby games? I doubt it. I would be surprised if any of them even bought Pandemic, much as they liked it.

I agree with others that you can't expect to introduce a certain game to anyone and expect them to suddenly become a raging board game addict.

Has anyone said you could?

mjl1783 wrote:

I agree with others that you can't expect to introduce a certain game to anyone and expect them to suddenly become a raging board game addict.

Has anyone said you could?

More or less, yeah. It seems to be a common hope (at least on TOS) of what "the perfect gateway game" might inspire.

clockwirk wrote:

"Gateway" games exist, but they are mis-named because they don't necessarily lead to anything. If it seems like they inspire interest in gaming in a couple of people in your group, it's because those people were already gamers at heart. I own several "gateway" games, not to create gamers, but to weed them out of the crowd.

Right, "gateway" is really bad term. We should really be calling them "casual" much like casual video games that are all the rage on the Wii and DS.