What we all need to know, in order to play well together, is that anyone can quit at any time for any reason. If we are sure of that, we can be sure that we are playing with people who want to be playing.
In my experience, if you can explain a game in 10 seconds you'll be bored of it in 10 minutes.
What happens when you make a metric shit ton of games you weren’t making before, and spend a huge amount of time on wild-eyed launch marketing? Quality suffers.
A game doesn’t need zombies, astronauts or Russian gnome submariners to tell a story. Even the most abstract games are story builders, as can be seen with chess. A game of chess has no setting, it’s not really a representation of war, but it has a beginning and an end, it has suspense and reversals, and it can be dramatically retold—so every game is a different story. Of course, this is even more true of a game of Zombicide.
You can obviously learn about what happened on Little Round Top by reading about it, but you can gain insights unavailable in books by pushing bloodless little cardboard representations of Colonel Oates’ Alabamians toward Professor Chamberlain and his men from Maine.
I use board games to teach game design because board games let you focus on the game itself; there is no coding and only limited art.
Many players do get a kick out of beating others with their naked minds alone, which is at least better than naked fists. Chess players are particularly obnoxious in this regard. But the real interest is in struggling toward a goal.
This argues pretty strongly that if people are to achieve their maximum potential, they need to do the hard work of playing the games they don’t get, the games that don’t appeal to their natures.