Understanding the Player Journey in Board Games

Introducing the Tabletop Engagement Curve

After years of observing players at conventions, game cafés, workshops and community game nights, I began noticing a pattern in how people experience tabletop games.

When someone plays a game for the first time, they are not really “playing to win”. They are trying to understand the game.

What is this game about?
What do these pieces do?
What am I allowed to do on my turn?
How does someone win?

At this stage, the player’s mind is busy decoding the system.

But something interesting happens after a couple of plays.

Players begin to see how the game works. They recognize interactions between mechanics. They start noticing opportunities and mistakes. This is when experimentation begins.

And then comes another shift.

Once players understand the system, they begin optimizing. Turns become more deliberate. Strategies emerge. Players begin thinking about efficiency, scoring routes, and anticipating opponents.

In simple terms, a tabletop player seems to move through three broad stages:

Learning → Understanding → Optimizing

But the insight that fascinated me most was not the stages themselves — it was the time players spend in each stage.

Some players enjoy the discovery and social interaction of early plays. Others love exploring systems and uncovering strategies. And some players enjoy pushing the system to its limits in search of the most efficient path to victory.

Over time, I began mapping these observations into a simple model I call the Tabletop Engagement Curve.

It describes how players move through different stages of understanding as they interact with a game system.

Learning → Competence → Exploration → Optimization → Meta Play

Each stage represents a different kind of engagement with the game.

In the early stage, players focus on understanding rules and actions.
In the middle stages, players explore strategies and system interactions.
In later stages, players optimise their play and respond to other players.

What makes this interesting for designers is that games themselves influence how long players stay in each stage.

A party game keeps players in discovery.
A gateway game invites exploration.
A heavy strategy game rewards optimization.

In other words, game design shapes the player’s journey.

This leads to a powerful design question:

Where does the fun begin in your game?

Some games are fun immediately.
Some become fun once players understand the system.
Some only shine when players begin optimizing their play.

The distance between “learning the game” and “experiencing the fun” may be one of the most important factors in game design.

In future posts and design workshops, I’ll explore this idea further and share how this framework can help designers think about audience, replayability and game depth.

Because once you start seeing games through this lens, it changes how you design and play them.

Another way to look at this post:

Why Many Games Fail

Most weak games fall into one of three traps.

Trap 1 — Too Much Learning Friction

Players never get past Orientation.

Trap 2 — Shallow Exploration

After two plays, players have seen everything.

Trap 3 — Broken Optimisation

One strategy dominates.

Let's explore this in the next blog post. 

Thank you for following this blog.

- Phalgun