You Can't Rush Belonging: What a Light Dungeon Crawler Taught Me About the Most Underrated Design Problem in the Room
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. When I finally did, it sounded less like a board game review and more like a design brief. Most people pick a game for themselves - genre, weight, theme, mechanic. I picked Avel for two people who did not yet know they needed it. My wife and my daughter. And that distinction, between designing for yourself and designing the way in for somebody else, is the thing most learning designers, facilitators and game makers quietly get wrong. Every single time. So this is not really a story about a dungeon crawler. It's about the most underrated skill in experience design. The gateway.The Part Most of Us Are Bad At
Every expert in the room overestimates how much they can drag a newcomer through. I've watched it in workshops, in onboarding programmes, in escape rooms, and yes, at my own game table. Somebody loves a thing so much that they skip the part where they make you love it too. They hand you Arkham Horror when you have never rolled a d20 in your life. They drop you into a three-day leadership simulation before you understand why you're in the building. They lead with the complicated thing, explain it for two hours, and then look genuinely puzzled that the room is flat. That is not a knowledge problem. That'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 is done inside ninety minutes. By serious gaming standards this is the shallow end, and that is exactly the point. I wasn't running a swim meet. I was showing two people the water is worth getting into.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. You cannot negotiate with the moon. There is no "just one more round". It comes. And because it comes slowly, across the whole arc of the session, people start deciding differently. Not reacting. Deciding, with a slowly growing awareness that every single move is costing them something. 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 kept glancing at it between turns with a look I can only describe as respectful anxiety. That's engagement. That's the game doing its job while I sat there doing nothing.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 the bit gamification frameworks miss every time they get bolted onto corporate learning like tinsel on a PowerPoint. They reward mastery and punish inexperience, which is precisely the dynamic that kills psychological safety inside 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 does not make you earn the feeling of being a player. It hands it over on your first roll and trusts you to grow into it.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 it 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. Those are not small concepts. They sit under almost every heavy tabletop game on the shelf, and they arrived through ninety minutes of hexagons and dice with not one word of lecture. Three weeks later we played Massive Darkness 2. 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 you look. The simulation that drops people into a live brief with cold decision-making muscles. The workshop that opens on a complex framework before anybody shares a vocabulary. The onboarding programme built on the assumption that employees turned up pre-motivated. They did not. 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. It takes somebody willing to ask the uncomfortable question out loud: 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 got approved. The facilitator is genuinely excellent. And the room is still sitting there, waiting to care. I have been in those rooms as a participant, as a designer, and as the man at the back watching the energy leave a session that should have worked. What Avel reminded me is that the problem is almost never the content. It's sequencing. It's pacing. It's deciding, on purpose, not to hand people the full picture on day one - because the full picture has never once earned 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 worth asking is whether you built enough early wins that people actually want to be in the room when it turns up.With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.
Arvindh runs PutThePlayerFirst.com, a one-person studio designing serious games, simulations, and learning experiences that make people think, feel, and collaborate differently.See these ideas in action
Put The Player First runs serious game sessions for leadership teams across India. The designer is in the room for every session.
See the games Get in touch