I’ve found a weird parallel between how I learn board games and how I do product development. Some people pore over the rulebooks and want to know exactly how everything works. I’ll generally give a rulebook a quick scan, get what I think is the gist of the game, and then dive in.

I’ll often make rule mistakes, miss things, and the session can sometimes be a chaotic mess. For folks who like to have rule precision, it can often be frustrating. My expectation is that the first playthrough will be trash. It’ll be full of errors, the wrong person might win, and there might be a lot of corrections & rule-checking.

Sometimes I’ll do this first playthrough by myself, and soak up all the ways I screw things up.

If I know that the people I’m playing with can’t tolerate a giant mess, I’ll do my best to put in effort to make it right the first time.

But most of the time, I’ll just dive into that first play half-cocked and screw it all up. Why? Because it’s *much* faster to learn that way.

Trying to read rules absent the experience, it’s hard to understand what the rule-writers mean. How am I supposed to understand what this rule means without any context? Without trying to make a decision and all the associated pressures, how do I understand what the bounds are?

I find that I get a lot of pleasure out of diving into that process with a bunch of other people that don’t mind going off not really knowing what we’ll encounter, and who don’t mind throwing out that first game in the name of exploration and discovery.

Sometimes it’ll even be a few turns in, and we’ll just end up tossing out this play, resetting things, and starting over before even finishing, if it’s obvious that things have gone off the rails. And that next playthrough? It’s almost always great, because we know what we’re doing.

Here’s the thing – in my experience, even if you read all the rules – you’ll make fewer mistakes. You’ll start with a better understanding. But you’ll still screw up. You’ll still potentially make fatal errors while playing that will ruin the game. This happens enough of the time that in my experience, going in knowing you’re gonna make a huge mess is *faster* and more efficient. And as long as it’s not going to upset folks (which it has in the past for me, and in those cases it’s a mistake!!) – it can be a great collaborative exploration experience.

I often do this wrong in board games – because there’s only one manual, it’s hard to get everyone to have the same access to the core information. But in product development, that’s a huge part of what I try to do – get everyone as exposed to the rulebook as possible. And then rather than knowing everything before we start, we take a giant flying leap off a cliff together and hope we can build a parachute before we go splat.

it’s a great time. 😀