Explaining how to play TTR over the phone to non-gamers

We got a phone call this evening from some friends who had just received a copy of Ticket to Ride for Chanukah. They just had one or two quick questions. We just happened to be sitting around the table playing games with our neighbor, who is like a total TTR freak, so we put speaker phone on, figuring she could answer a couple of questions while we continued our game. That didn't happen. Instead we ended up trying to explain the entire game over the phone. When we were done, my friend said, "So I put my train on my starting destination..." At that point we recommended that they try YouTube for a video tutorial.

Dang, it is hard to explain a game to people if it doesn't involve moving pieces around on a board.

Michael Barnes wrote: Ah, but there was a better way-

"Download TTR Pocket on your phone. Play the tutorial. Takes about three minutes."

We also told them about the app, but they weren't to keen on that idea. I think maybe they didn't want the kid to know that it existed.

They did read the rules. They just couldn't wrap their heads around them. Unfortunately, they didn't just ask us to teach them the game. It started as a couple of questions, which means that we thought they understood the basic concept of the game and started by just answering the two questions. The first couple of questions were rather straight forward. One was when do you score. Our answer was that destinations score at the end of the game, but it is easiest if you score your routes during the game, like you do with Scrabble. Some where in that explanation, we realized that they didn't know the difference between a route and a destination. Two quick questions turned into several more. When they got to "Why are there grey spaces on the board, but no grey trains?" and "What are the numbers around the edge of the board?" we realized that our initial assumption was incorrect, and that our answers to their first two questions had kind of gone right over their heads.

I think that part of the problem is that the adults in the group each had their own preconceived notions about how the game played, based upon other board games that they had played. The were having trouble reconciling those notions with the actual rules they had read. So, for example, one of them seemed to have started with the idea that the game was a race to get your engine from a starting destination to an ending destination. Another thought it played like Scrabble, but was having trouble understanding that you didn't place something on the board and score every turn. The Rummy comparison just confused the issue, because you can draw cards and play a meld on your turn in Rummy, and you keep your melds in front of you, plus not everyone had played rummy.

It finally dawned on me that probably what had happened is the adults had quarreled about which of them had the correct notion of the game, and had called us in the hopes that we would declare one of them correct. We had gotten sucked into a whole other type of game, if you know what I mean, and questions were being asked to confirm that the asker was right, rather than to clarify the game rules. Our final ruling was that the eight year old, who had no preconceived notions about the game, was in the best position to figure out how to play the game and explain it to the adults.

Well, I guess despite our flailing, we did an okay job. I just received a thank you message from our friends. They played TTR twice, and say that they are "hooked." They also invited us to check out a boardgame cafe that they just found out about. I'm now contemplating how long before I can introduce them to Arkham Horror