I am strongly in favour of declaring the first round of a board game a practice round. It gives everyone a chance to discover what the cheerful collection of little wooden objects actually wants from them. Somebody will understand the scoring immediately. Somebody else will have spent five minutes trying to buy a tree.
The useful moment usually arrives when a turn has happened. The explanation suddenly has something to attach itself to: that card goes there, those pieces come back, and the apparently decorative symbol is about to become everyone’s main concern. A worked example with mildly competitive friends is much easier to follow than a whole rulebook delivered aloud.
There is a lot of fun in those early discoveries. A harmless-looking move turns out to be excellent, a carefully assembled plan achieves almost nothing, and someone asks whether they were supposed to be collecting points. Ideally, everyone gets to enjoy being briefly baffled without feeling that they have already lost the evening.
Once the basics click, you can reset if you want to, or carry on with the understanding that the opening was educational. The aim is to get a table full of people playing. If the first round ends with laughter and a sudden appreciation of the trees, I would count it as a success.
