The Confession That Changes Everything
“I didn’t buy Avel because I wanted to play it. I bought it because I wanted my family to want what comes after it.” That sentence sat in my head for weeks before I said it out loud, and when I did, it felt less like a board game review and more like a design brief. Most people pick games for themselves — genre, weight, theme, mechanic. I picked Avel for two people who didn’t yet know they needed it: my wife and my daughter. That distinction, between designing for yourself and designing the entry point for someone else, is the one that most learning designers, facilitators, and game makers quietly get wrong every single time.
This isn’t a story about a dungeon crawler. It’s a story about the most underrated skill in experience design — the art of the gateway.
The Problem Nobody Admits They’re Bad At
Every expert in the room overestimates how much they can drag a newcomer through. I’ve watched it happen in workshops, in onboarding programmes, in escape rooms, and yes, at the game table — someone who loves a thing so much they skip the part where they make you love it too. They hand you Arkham Horror when you’ve never rolled a d20. They drop you into a three-day leadership simulation before you understand why you’re there. They start with the complex thing, spend two hours explaining it, and then wonder why the room feels flat. It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a gateway problem.
Avel is light. Almost aggressively so. Its dungeon is made of face-down hexagons you flip as you go. Its monsters come in two sizes: small and big. Its combat is dice, rolled by both sides, resolved in seconds. The whole thing fits in under ninety minutes. By most serious gaming standards, this is the shallow end. But that’s the point — I wasn’t managing a swim meet. I was teaching two people that the water is worth getting in.
A Moon That Actually Meant Something
The best pressure mechanic I’ve encountered in years wasn’t in a heavy euros game or a tense worker placement — it was a wooden marker on a printed moon track. Every turn, the moon advances. When it reaches its final position, the boss appears. There’s no negotiating with the moon. There’s no “just one more round.” It comes. And because it comes slowly, inexorably, across the arc of the whole session, players start making decisions differently — not reactively, but with a creeping awareness that every move has a cost.
Watch a newcomer interact with that mechanic and you’ll see something quietly beautiful happen: they start planning. Not because they’ve read a strategy guide, not because they’ve played four sessions and unlocked optimal routing — but because the game has given them a horizon. Finite time pressure is one of the most powerful cognitive tools in any facilitated experience, and it doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to be visible. The moon track is visible. My daughter would glance at it between turns with a look I can only describe as respectful anxiety. That’s engagement. That’s the game working.
Dice, Bags, and the Social Contract of Randomness
There is a moment at any table — any workshop table, any game table, any team meeting — where the expert and the newcomer are briefly, beautifully equal. Dice create that moment. When my wife rolled her first combat round, she had exactly the same odds I did. The bag of random loot didn’t know she’d never played a dungeon crawler before. The wishing well — a mechanic where you gamble coins for unknown rewards — didn’t ask for credentials. And in that randomness, she won a few. She lost a few. She laughed at both. That’s not a flaw in the design. That’s the design.
This is something that gamification frameworks consistently miss when they’re bolted onto corporate learning like a Christmas decoration on a PowerPoint. They reward mastery and punish inexperience, which is exactly the dynamic that kills psychological safety in the first five minutes. Avel’s randomness isn’t about fairness — it’s about belonging. When the dice fall your way on your first session, you feel like you belong at the table. When the random draw from the bag gives you a potion you didn’t expect, you feel clever for using it well. The game doesn’t ask you to earn the feeling of being a player. It hands it to you with your first roll, and trusts you to grow from there.
Simple Doesn’t Mean Stupid
The assumption that simple systems can’t carry complex ideas is the lazy designer’s most comfortable lie. Avel has hero boards with double-layered equipment slots. It has weapons that work differently against different monster types — represented by coloured tokens. It has a modular map that changes the layout, the distance to objectives, the clustering of threats. It has single-use items that mirror Numenera’s cipher philosophy: powerful, exciting, and gone. None of this is complicated. All of it teaches.
By the time we’d finished our first session, my wife understood action economy. My daughter understood risk/reward tradeoffs on the wishing well. Both understood that co-op play means losing together, which is a very different social contract to competing. These are not trivial concepts. They are the foundation of almost every complex tabletop RPG on the shelf — and they were delivered through ninety minutes of hexagons and dice, without a single lecture. We played Massive Darkness 2 three weeks later. The gateway held.
The Facilitator’s Real Job Is Designing the On-Ramp
Nobody walks into depth. They’re brought to the edge and shown that it’s worth jumping. I’ve spent years watching facilitators design the experience while completely forgetting to design the entry point — the moment that decides whether someone leans in or checks their phone. It’s the same mistake everywhere. The simulation that drops participants into a live brief without warming up their decision-making muscles. The workshop that opens with a complex framework before establishing any shared language. The onboarding programme that assumes employees arrived pre-motivated.
The gateway isn’t a compromise. It isn’t the simplified version you offer because you feel bad about the real thing. It is the real thing — designed well. Avel isn’t a lesser dungeon crawler. It’s a precisely engineered experience that does exactly what it set out to do, for exactly the audience it was built for. That takes skill. That takes someone asking the uncomfortable question: Who isn’t in the room yet, and what do they need from me before they can meet me where I am?
What This Has to Do With Everything I Build
At PutThePlayerFirst.com, I work on a specific problem: the gap between people who know something matters and the people who haven’t felt it yet. That gap is where most L&D falls apart. The content is there. The budget was approved. The facilitator is excellent. And the room is still waiting to care. I’ve been in those rooms — as a participant, as a designer, as the person watching the energy drain out of a session that should have worked.
What Avel reminded me is that the problem is almost never content. It’s sequencing. It’s pacing. It’s the deliberate decision to not give people the full picture on day one, because the full picture isn’t what earns commitment — the first small win does. My simulations are built around this principle. Before I ask anyone to make a high-stakes decision in a simulation, I give them a small decision that’s rewarding to make — something with clear feedback, a tactile result, a sense of authorship. I’m building their moon track. I’m letting them roll the dice before the boss arrives.
The wishing well mechanic stayed with me longer than I expected. There’s something about a voluntary risk — coins you choose to gamble, with outcomes you can’t predict — that produces a quality of engagement you simply can’t script. In my sessions, I look for the equivalent: the moment I can hand a group a genuinely uncertain choice, with real (simulated) stakes, and step back. That’s when the room wakes up. That’s when people stop being participants and start being players.
The moon is always moving. The boss is always coming. The only question is whether you’ve designed an experience that gives people enough early wins to want to be there when it arrives.
Arvindh runs PutThePlayerFirst.com — a one-person studio designing serious games, simulations, and learning experiences that make people think, feel, and collaborate differently.