There's something fishy about my new accountant.

Cod you be a bit more specific?

I forget his name but he used to work for Halibut-on.

Getting good at reading the board takes time and experience and I don't think it can be taught. It can be illustrated but not taught. The same applies to breaking off and resetting your forces.

The person doing the teaching is going to need a lot of patience. Initially there's a lot for the noob to learn.

If you believe that you can't teach someone how to read a board, then I think you have a poor view of teaching. Teaching is all about facilitating learning, not about force-feeding information. If experience is what they need, then you set up scenarios to give them experience.

I think you're right about needing patience. Teaching isn't for everyone. Personally, I love teaching, whether it's at the game store, at home, or in the classroom. Teaching's my jam. I'm very lucky that we have had some new players join our group in the past month. It's been super fun trying to teach list-building, obstacle placement, and target priority, to name a few things.

To use your example of scenarios, you have one ship chasing another. You show the student the possible moves the chased ship can make and the possible moves the chasing ship can make. You break down the moves and explain the risk/rewards of the moves. For example a large based ship turning away from a corner rather than into it. This is the illustration. During a game the student faces a similar situation BUT this time the large based ship is a little further away from the corner. Turning into the corner is now a better option than the one presented in your scenario. The student's response to this situation is going to be based upon your scenario, what he's experienced (learned) during this game and past games. This is the part that can't be taught.

You can teach someone the game mechanics. The mechanics don't change. You can show them what to look for when trying to anticipate an opponent's move but a small change in position can have big effect on how you read it and respond to it.

Seen a lot of topics on the forum recently requesting help - either with combatting a build which regularly beats the TC, or general advice on playing the game. Which is fine of course - that's what the forum is for. And the number of people responding to these pleas is heartening.

What concerns me though are the answers we're giving.

A lot of the answers appear to be along the lines of "take this" or "use this" or "this build will wreck it", which really isn't ideal. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to specifically tailor a list to beat another list, and it doesn't help in the long run, either, because it's not getting to the root of the problem - it's basically just creating an arms race.

I think you're right, and at times I've been guilty of this mistake myself. The reason is almost always that I don't have time to teach it properly, but I do have time to point out a list or an upgrade that might help.

To learn any given subject (Xwing) you must also teach and by teaching at the basic level to an idiopathic student...

Do you mean "idiosyncratic"? I think I agree, but I'm confused.

The post game autopsy is difficult to perform. Especially with a new player. The noob is over loaded with information. The ship's dial, space rocks, opponent's ship position, etc.. In the case of a first time player a mirror match, single ship with no upgrades maybe the way to go for several games.

There was a technique used when I took driver's ed called annotated driving. The student driver would verbalize what he saw or did. For example, "there's a blue van passing me on the left". It let the instructor know that the student had situational awareness. This takes guessing the move one step further. It also gives the advanced player an immediate idea of what the noob is thinking...

I can see how that might create some problems for some students (or teachers). I have ADHD, and one of the consequences of that is I tend to pay a tiny slice of attention to everything. Figuring out which of the massive set of inputs are relevant or important to a particular task has been a lifelong project for me, and trying to explain to someone else everything I'm noticing or thinking about a game would be... not helpful.

I mention that because...

Teaching someone the mechanics of chess is easy. There are only eight moves. This includes En Passant and Castling. You can teach someone chess in less than two hours but for them to learn the game takes longer and can't be taught. The learning part comes with experience.

...there's been a lot of research done on the development of expertise through the lens of chess (precisely because the mechanics are simple but the game is complex, and because most people understand how to play chess at least on a basic level). One of the consistent findings is that very inexperienced players tend to consider only a small set of the possible moves in any given turn, because that's all they can "see". As those new players grow in experience and expertise toward becoming intermediate players, they start to consider a wider and wider set.

But when intermediate players start to become experts, the set of moves they consider stops growing and starts shrinking. They become able to intuitively discard moves that aren't useful, without spending time actually processing them. I think part of the "problem" with developing expertise in X-wing is that given a single board state at the start of a round, there's an extraordinarily large set of possible board states that could result at the end of the round.

The set is actually too large for any human to meaningfully sort through. (The simplest dial has 12 maneuvers on it, and each ship has two available actions, and then there are collisions to consider...) So learning to ignore all but an infinitesimal proportion of those board states is a task that requires substantial expertise, but it's one of the first things new players need to learn. I think that's why a lot of new (and even intermediate) players tend to fly in a fairly rigid formation even when it doesn't make sense to do so--it helps cut down the amount of information they need to process if all their ships fly as a single unit.

So that ADHD-ness is actually useful in a way, because narrowing an arbitrarily large set of things down to just the ones I really need is something I have to do all the time anyway, and (unlike most people) it's almost always the first thing I have to do.

I always preferred light a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day, light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life...

If I were to give one piece of advice to new gamers, old gamers, whatever. When playing a casual game with friends, do a lessons learned after the game.

What went right.

What went wrong.

Could either of these be mitigated by either side?

How?

Doing this for 10 mins after every game (or longer) all but guarantees learning and improvement.

Sometimes it's the will of the dice, I'll be honest. sometimes it just is. I've seen games where statistically long odds either way happen and the game just goes one sided. I've seen it in all supposedly balanced games. X-wing and Infinity, two of the most popular are no different. But usually, even then something could have been mitigated.

Only twice out of many of my games have I had to say "to be honest, this was all the dice". Both times my opponent agreed. Only one of these two games was x-wing.

This was what I always tried to do after all of my early games, and it helped so much that I continue to try to do it every time I play. Both players should end of learning something in the process, so it's a win-win practice.

Works for all games pretty much too.

This practice started on our friday night 40K games, before x-wing was a thing. It evolved from there.

Vorpal,

My first wife was doing her dissertation on how people learn. From what little I remember of it dealt with small incremental steps. Similar to how a house is built. Start with a good foundation and go from there. New players are at a decided disadvantage compared to players who started with the original core set. All the new pilots, ships and upgrade cards means sensory overload. It's human nature to want to get up and running asap. There's little or no patience for starting at Wave 1 and building your experience slowly and in a logical manner. I speak from experience on this. In less than year I've purchased everything except the Corvette. And my play has suffered for it. Had I purchased the core and Wave 1 I think I would have been further ahead in my playing ability. These forums have gone a long way to fill some of the holes in my "education".

Ideally the best way for noobs to learn would be to start at the beginning and play a bunch of games and progress to Wave 2 in incremental steps. That won't happen as the 'need' to be competitive is too great.

I started 2 weeks after the phantom change, and placed second in a regional in late April. The way I caught up to roughly 2 years of gameplay was by figuring out the big players in the current (at that time) meta. If I had tried to learn what every single upgrade card and pilot did I probably could have done it, but I would have had to sacrifice table practice and in game mechanics developing.

I think the fastest way to bring new players up to speed is to play a few Core Set games, then have them teach it back to you so you can ensure they have a firm grasp of the basic concepts. Then you introduce complete lists that are commonplace, have them pick one they like the looks of, and teach them everything about that list. Then you teach them what the list has problems with, and how it interacts with other lists the new player is likely to run into. If they are confident in the game core mechanics and one "strong" list they will have all the tools they need to explore the more discreet upgrades and pilots at their own pace and create their own lists.

Shirako,

That's an excellent concept! Great way to jumpstart somebody into X-wing. Wish I had thought of that. Would have saved me a lot of time.

Make a man a fire and he's warm for an hour - set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

At the same time, offering ideas which use variations on a ship (other pilots, other talents, etc) are quite sensible.

The problem is that it's an easy kind of suggestion to offer. Beating Twin Laser Turrets with a list is an easy answer - explaining tactics is hard - not least (unfortunately) because tactics may be tied to a build.

At the same time, there are tactics, and you can beat a 'better' squad that someone's pulled off the internet by learning how to fly yours.

It's like my response to the Emerald Octahedrons Of Inevitable Betrayal.

Yes, the green dice let you down. But* it's your fault you needed to dodge 2 hits with unmodified green dice. Somewhere along the line you made a choice - either deployment or maneuver - which put you in a suboptimal position. Try to figure out what it was.

* Barring the classic "Dark Curse with a focus token at range 3 through an asteroid with a stealth device got one-shotted by a Z-95". Which actually happened last week - although fortunately not to me.

10 out of 10 doctors recommend that humans do not eat plastic Star Wars miniatures.