You’re planning a COIN game night. Let’s say you have three friends coming over and you’re the only player who knows the game, or the COIN system for that matter.

But you’ve never taught it.

You want to get it right. You feel it’s your responsibility to make sure they enjoy themselves and the game, while learning it properly. Plus if your group ends up liking the game, it means you’ll get a chance to play it more often, right?

Teaching any game to 3 people at once can be challenging. COIN games are not more difficult than many games out there. But they’re less obvious. They’re different. You’re not sure where to start.

Relax. There is only one mistake you can make: not being prepared. And since you’re reading this, it means you’ve decided to avoid that.

Be Prepared

Being prepared not only means that you have played the game at least a few times, with each faction, including the non-player. It also means deciding in advance everything that can be decided — there’s more than it seems — so that when the time comes you can jump right in.

Choose the right format

A few simple questions will allow you to make sure everybody agrees on the format of the session. How much time will you have? Does your group expect to play a complete game, or are they more interested in going through a learning tutorial (for instance, as suggested by Volko Ruhnke, a single campaign leaving out events and special activities)? Will they prefer to play openly, with you teaching along, or just want you to introduce the basics and then let them do their thing? For me open plays have worked well every time.

Choose the right game

Of course it depends on the skill and interests of the players. But generally, as I mentioned in a previous post, of the 6 COIN games published so far I think that Cuba Libre is the best possible choice to introduce COIN to new players. Small map, short deck, straightforward actions, clear goals.

Choose the right scenario

Cuba Libre doesn’t offer scenarios. But I find that the short game option (2.1 in the rulebook) is a good fit for a first session. Plus it leaves you with 8 extra cards that you can use for demonstration. I have never used the no reveal option (2.2) with beginners and never found that seeing the upcoming card causes a problem. But you know your group and will choose accordingly.

Choose the right factions

This is critical. Here again Cuba Libre is ideal. The Government is the most different faction in the game. And you, as the more experienced player, will play it. The beginners will play the three insurgent factions. Here’s why:

• The Government, with its own rules and its strategic position, is more challenging to play (see what happened in 1959!).
• You avoid having to give too many details about things like Aid or the US Alliance track.
• The insurgent factions are simpler and have a lighter overall rule burden.
• Since their basic rules are quite similar, you can target many explanations so that they apply to all insurgent factions.
• Since they share many mechanics, the new players will benefit more from watching the other insurgents play, keeping them engaged.
• Still, when you’re playing the Government, take great care to always explain every action you’re doing. What, how and why.

One player doesn’t show up? I would recommend that you play the non-player Syndicate. Its rules are quite simple and will not distract you as much as playing two “live” factions. Just make sure you’ve played it enough to be fluent.

Choosing the factions ahead of time brings another benefit. Each player can get to know his faction before the meet-up. They can read ahead of time the good role summary at p. 14-15 of the playbook (the design notes on p. 27-31 are more general, but quite interesting too). If you know that they won’t find it too intimidating, suggest that they also read the rules concerning their faction.

And if it’s all a question of getting in the mood, why not watch a documentary almost cut to be a primer on Cuba Libre: Cuba: The Forgotten Revolution (it’s available on Netflix, at least in Canada).

Do a Regular Setup…

Those decisions allow you to do the entire setup ahead of time as well. Trying to present and explain this kind of game to total beginners while sorting and shuffling cards, counting and placing pieces is, in my experience, needlessly long, error prone, and distracting to both you and your guests. You want each player to sit in front of his own pieces right away. Make them feel in charge.

… But Seed the Deck

The last thing you want is hitting a Propaganda round right at the start of the game. Or two Propagandas close to each other. To make sure that the first few campaigns will go smoothly, and that you control the rhythm, seed the draw deck.

Once I’ve shuffled all Event cards and split them into 4 piles, I take the bottom 3 or 4 cards of each pile and reshuffle them with the Propaganda card before stacking them. That way the Propaganda cards will be reasonably far apart, and everybody will have a chance to get the feel of a campaign before hitting their first Propaganda.

OK. Enough foreplay. You’re all sitting at the table with your friends, around the board you’ve set up. Now it’s time for the main course. Time to unleash the core rules on them.

Be Swift

Now’s where you do some heavy lifting — in order to remain as light as possible. You just want to state the base rules. But it still can sound like a lot. My advice: say as few words as possible, and when you do, use theirs as much as possible.

In Their Own Words

Presenting the game using language and concepts they already understand is a great way to keep things simple and fun. Think a little about your group’s mindset or gaming background. Like which gaming tribe they belong to.

Eurogamers. Players of heavy European (or American) style games shouldn’t have any problem getting into COIN (I don’t recommend initiating 3 casual or light Eurogame players directly to COIN). You can still flatten the learning curve though, by choosing your terms and examples appropriately. Fortunately the COIN system is rooted in Euro-style games. So it won’t even be a stretch to present the game in terms they’re familiar with.

Wargamers. You’re running a good chance that wargamers are familiar with Card Driven Games. If so, there is certainly knowledge you can draw upon. The COIN Event card mechanics are a simplified version of traditional CDGs. No operation points, no hand management. Also worth a try, highlighting military terms and events, since this is the way wargamers are likely to better understand key concepts. I have no experience initiating “hex & counter” grognards to COIN, although I have heard that it might not always be as easy as it seems. So if anyone of you can fill me in, you’re more than welcome!

The Need-to-Know Basis

The core COIN system is simple. Once you get it, all remaining information will snap right in. Unfortunately, those few core principles are not always obvious. Newcomers tend to first see details, background information and other minutia before discerning the idea behind them. As the game explainer your role is to shield them from such distractions, and bring them as quickly as possible to some higher grounds from which they’ll be able to see the big picture and make sense of it by themselves.

A quick example. Do you really want to recite all the preconditions, procedure steps and outcomes of a Rally operation? For sure, nobody will want to hear that. It will take forever, be too abstract and get buried by all subsequent explanations. I just explain that “Rally” is how they add pieces, and then move on (“March” is how they move, “Attack”, how they remove enemy pieces, etc.). During the game, when they want to add pieces, then I assist them going through the steps relevant to the current situation, nothing more. In my experience, that way new players learn very quickly to play by themselves.

That said, if you’ve done your part correctly so far, it should go very smoothly. Here is, as I wrap up, the outline of a typical presentation of the core system to beginners. Pick and choose what suits you best if anything. No matter how you present it, have a path, and keep it straight and clear.

An Outline

The Game. What is this game about. How does it unfold. How do you win. Obviously there are many ways you can go about this. I generally use no more than a few broad sentences, making sure I mention that the game unfolds over several series of event cards called “campaigns”. That during each of those campaigns, players will typically play several turns. That they can win by having reached a certain amount of points at the end of any campaign. And that they earn points from what they do on the map.

The Map. Provinces versus cities. Terrain types will limit some actions. I gloss over the industrial centers for now, just mentioning that they are special zones earning points to some factions during scoring. I mostly introduce population and present control as a simple area majority mechanic allowing or denying actions, helping gain support. The importance of Support/Opposition. How they shift. How they multiply the population values. How they earn points on the track.

The Cards. Their four main purposes: timing the gameplay, determining turn order, offering additional special actions or “powers”, triggering a scoring round. I show a few sample cards (I’ve kept some handy), the icons of the player order, and the two versions of the event. Each event is mostly a one-time special action that can be chosen by an active faction instead of its normal actions. Dual Use. Momentum and Capabilities: long-lasting or permanent effects.

All Insurgent Factions. Piece types, role and value. Underground versus active as Visible/Invisible. The player aids, the action menu. The four main actions (operations): adding pieces, moving pieces, influencing the population (reducing Support, gaining Opposition), removing enemy pieces. Details kept for later.

Each Insurgent Faction. Who it is. What it is after. Where it starts on the VP track, where it aims to go, and what makes its markers move on the track. Its victory goals (how the faction wins the game). Its scoring (propaganda) goals (how the faction earns resources and avoids penalties during scoring). Its custom, facultative and generally free actions (special activities).

The Turn. When is their turn. What do they do on their turn. Why do they do it. The Card Flip. The player order. Choosing between their actions and the event. Most actions can be performed more than once. Their cost. Their associated special activities.

The Sequence of Play. Now that they know about the events and both kinds of actions, I introduce the SoP as a basic worker placement mechanic. Two factions per card. Eligibility. First, second eligible. How they indicate their actions using their pawn. Passing, how and why. Limited actions (LimOps).

The Propaganda. Scoring round. Once every 7-10 cards. The game may end there. Otherwise players gain resources, may have to move or remove a few units. All pieces become “invisible” again, all factions eligible. Here again, no need to go through the details of a Propaganda round, it will be much easier to explain while performing it.

The End. At the start of any Scoring round, if a player has reached its victory threshold, the game ends right away and that player wins.

There it is. That’s far from being the whole story, but it’s more than enough to start a game and have fun. The success of any game night will entirely depend on the particular group you’re teaching to. But the key ingredient to a successful first COIN game night will be how well-prepared you are. Give it a go!

I play a lot of heavy Eurogames. I enjoy long, tortuous brain burners and thick rulebooks don’t bother me. I’m also quite interested in history. One could think that the COIN Series, published by GMT Games, and featuring a card-driven game system designed by Volko Ruhnke to model guerrilla warfare, was a natural step for me.

But it turned out not to be. At all.

Now that I am more familiar with that system, I wonder why I had such a hard time getting used to it. And as I look back, I can identify a few things that I did wrong, which made the learning curve needlessly steep and frustrating.

Here they are.

So If you are a Eurogame player currently trying to wrap your brain around COIN, or wondering if this kind of game is for you, I would encourage you to do two things. First read on, skim through what follows and see if anything can be of help. Second, play a COIN game as soon as possible. It can be an exceptionally rewarding experience.

Just don’t do what I did.

1. Don’t Assume That You Will Be Playing a Eurogame

An easy mistake to make. So you’ve looked those COIN games up. You’ve established that there are no hex-and-counter stuff, no micro-management of weapons, supply lines, line of sight or reinforcements. Instead,  you feel right at home with what you see: four-player games, region maps, resource management, brightly colored wooden pieces, a victory point track around the board and a certain level of abstraction. You’ve got area control, influence, cards, dice. Really seems like a war-themed Eurogame, doesn’t it?

Now what happens when you first sit down at a COIN table with expectations of that kind might not be pretty. Because the clean, orderly, safe Euro experience you’re accustomed to gets disheveled rather quickly and extensively.

Far from being eased into the game by nice rule writing and flavor text, you’ll fight your way through stern, telegraphic style statements. Their military terms and acronyms will remind you how little you actually know about the subject matter at hand, or counter-insurgency in general, whereas the terms you do understand won’t keep you in a Euro mood for long. Assassinate, Kidnap, Devastate, Rampage or Terror are as far from medieval farming, Renaissance painting or Mediterranean trading as you can get.

You know that moment when the rules of a good Eurogame click, when it all gels in your brain and the game kind of takes off on its own, so you can sit back and plan for victory? Won’t happen with COIN. Every card will disrupt your plans one way or the other.  You will never sit back.

You know that Euro moment when you finally get that clever engine going, pumping more and more points or resources all the way up the victory track? Won’t happen with COIN. You will never be on top of things.

You know that rare, unexpected moment that can arise once in every few Eurogames, that dramatic turning point that everybody will remember and talk about for a long time? Now that will happen with COIN. A lot. Probably a lot more than you’d like — practically on every card flip, that is.

I guess what I mean to say is that, although the actual ruleset of any COIN game is not heavy, and that it is undoubtedly rooted in Euro-style gaming, the way the games unfold is different enough to be destabilizing for the Eurogamer and the wargamer alike. So better approach them with as few preconceived ideas as possible.

2. Don’t Try to Get It Right — You Won’t

If, like me, you come to COIN from a Eurogaming background, you might tend to approach the rules a little too literally, and expect a little too much from them.

As the first few turns of any COIN game will demonstrate to you, reading and rereading the rules will not, cannot give you a sufficient understanding of the game.

Don’t think of the rules as a classical music score, where every note, every intonation is clearly written, but rather as a jazz chart, where a few abbreviations and sketchy lines barely give you some general direction.

And keep in mind that COIN games are extremely prone to player mistakes. Contrary to most Euros, COIN turns are not a quiet succession of neatly arranged, recurring phases. Sometimes there is a lot to do, and you don’t get to do the same things in the same order every turn. Which means that acquiring automatic reflexes takes much longer — at least it did for me. On top of that, there can be so many adjustments ensuing from a single move that you are bound to forget one of them. And build subsequent moves on that oversight, so that it will be almost impossible to sort out and correct.

You will stray off course often, sometimes without even realizing it. I guess you have to accept that, because triple-checking and second-guessing your every move is probably the best way to ruin your game. You want to take back every wrong move? You will simply mess things up even more. You want to go online with every rule question that pops up? Your tea will get cold before you complete your first move, and at best you will end up with more (and often conflicting) answers than you can handle anyway.

Just play it through, play it often, do your best. Leave as many stones unturned as you can. Don’t try to avoid, or worse, to correct mistakes. Just play, and let it sink in. It will.

3. Don’t Start with A Distant Plain

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against A Distant Plain, quite the contrary. But starting to learn the system with Volume III of the series was definitely not the greatest idea in my case.

The complexity level of the (as of now) 6 COIN titles published varies significantly, at least from a beginner’s point of view. And even if it has been shown that the overall complexity does not increase with every new title in the series, the first two volumes are widely recognized as the simplest, the easiest to grasp, especially when transitioning from Eurogaming.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad idea to approach the system from Volume III or IV; a lot of players do just that. But one has to realize that these later games are more advanced iterations of the base system, and as such they add quite a bit to it: new rules, finer intricacies and more exceptions, conditions and bookkeeping. Falling back to Andean Abyss after A Distant Plain was quite a shock for me. Not because it was that much simpler, but because I then discovered the vanilla version of many basic COIN concepts. I could finally see that what appeared to be, in ADP, a dense rule full of ramifications was, in fact, a thin layer of details added to a common foundation. I don’t know for you, but for me, things are much easier to learn in a gradual way, layer by layer.

So if you have the chance to get to know the core COIN ideas first by playing a good deal of the first two volumes (Cuba Libre was recently reprinted and the Andean Abyss reprint is on the GMT preorder list), why not do that. Both are about the same complexity level, but the map of Cuba Libre is much smaller and simpler, making it the perfect entry-level game.

Once you’ve got the core system down I think that the order in which you play the COIN titles does not matter at all and comes down to personal preference.

4. Don’t Begin by Playing Against the “Bots”

Now this is, by far, the very worst mistake I made.

My only excuse is that I play and enjoy a lot of solo games, both Eurogames and wargames. So, I first became aware of COIN because of its solo system, which I was very curious and eager to try out. A Distant Plain had just been released and, even if I was not especially attracted by the topic, about which I knew next to nothing, I bought it with the main goal of trying to play against those non-player factions, or ‘bots. So, terribly unaware of what lay ahead, I confidently jumped into a solo game right from the start.

Here’s how it felt. It’s the first bot’s turn. You just want to know what it can do this turn, and where. You rummage through a lot of rules, conditions and exceptions scattered over the rulebook, the playbook, the player aid sheets, errata and online forums. You reevaluate the board for the nth time, counting cubes of each color, checking which spaces are indeed adjacent, calculating control for all the targeted provinces. Ok. That probably means that it should do that, here. Done. Oh, wait, are there still three destination spaces to be determined for that first operation? So you go through this again, three more times. Before trying to resolve the trailing special activity and its own set of conditions and priorities. And you end up with not much more than guesswork, moves you can’t even fully explain to yourself. But at least you made it, right? The turn is finally completed! And then — then comes the turn of the second bot.

Then the third one.

Hopefully you get the picture. Ever made a long bus trip, getting off at every single stop?

As I said the COIN rules are neither that many nor that complex. But the so-called solo rules are not, in fact, rules. They are a broad and detailed set of instructions, conditions and priorities meant to apply the rules, to make non-player factions provide the best response in almost any situation. So trying to execute those instructions without a prior knowledge of the rules is a recipe for disaster.

I would suggest that you get the rules down first. By playing. You’re by yourself? Play each faction in turn, the best you can, digesting the rules. Get to know the main cards, the basic conditions. Take the time to make the necessary connections. To get acquainted with each faction, its main strengths, weaknesses and motivations. I’d say, until you begin to be able to think ahead. Then you can play fluidly against the bots. This will be a challenge, since they are cleverly designed, but a truly fun one.

5. The Help You Will Need Is Outside of the Rules

Based on a lot of comments seen online, what happened to me during my first few “real” plays happened to quite a few COIN beginners: even with a reasonable understanding of the rules, I still got stuck, because I had no idea of what to do.

Even if figuring out what to do is part of the fun behind historical gaming, one still needs a place to start. And with a COIN game, that place is not the rule book.

The Playbook

Obviously. For me the quality content that fills most GMT’s playbooks, the COIN ones especially, is a large part of the enjoyment I get from their games. And the COIN playbooks are the first stop for any COIN beginner.

The examples of play, the background notes for all factions and overview of how they interact, the summary of changes for experienced COIN gamers are all very helpful. And I especially enjoy the short blurb describing every event card in the game. It is well researched and hints at the event’s place in the whole narrative as well as at its impact on play. It has become a habit: During my first two or three COIN games, I will pause at every card flip to read the blurb. Not only did those 60, maybe 90 second pauses save me time in the long run, but they allowed the game and its subject matter to really grow on me.

Propaganda Rounds

This one seems also quite obvious with hindsight. But I got too entangled in all those solo rules to take advantage of the Propaganda rounds (or Winter cards, Winter Quarters cards, depending on the game played). Not only are they one of the rare somewhat predictable aspects of any COIN game, but their fixed phases are the menu of all short-term objectives for each faction: criteria for resource allocation and adding/removing forces, strategic value of control, roads, bases, etc.

Reverse-Engineering the Bots

You don’t want to play them at first, but that does not mean that the non-player factions are useless. Far from it. Think about it: in order to offer credible opposition, their behavior has been built on precise, complete, prioritized lists of best assessments and best responses, developed and tested by experts at the game. Those few charts might very well be the best possible gateway to the whole system. So, who in their right mind would try to tackle their first few games without such valuable advice? Well, I did.

Get to Know the Conflict

It goes without saying that knowing the historical background will help you play and enjoy any historical game. It might be even truer with COIN. In some cases, knowing the facts will help supplement rule ambiguities or shortcomings, and often help to remember pesky exceptions.

But you don’t need to be a scholar or a military expert to enjoy COIN — I’m most certainly not! If you can’t spare the time to read some of the titles recommended in the playbook’s Selected Sources, my other trick is to use the event card titles as a table of contents. Just type them as written, between quotes, in Google. See what comes up. Articles. Reports. Video documentaries. Manuals. I did just that many times and always learned something new, interesting, even surprising, that helped me get a more solid understanding of the game.

Playthroughs and Session Reports

Finally, looking at a few detailed playthroughs can help a lot. There are a few good ones online. Even if they won’t answer every rule question out there (and, yes, they probably contain mistakes), they can help clarify a few points and give beginners a general idea of the flow of the game.

All in all, there is simply no doubt in my mind that COIN games are quite accessible to the serious Eurogamer. But they are not Eurogames. Don’t spoil your first contact with COIN with the above mistakes and you’ll see how rich and unique a system it is.

What about you? Did you have a hard time learning COIN? Would you approach it any differently?