Be prepared for couples chemistry. We got distracted early by how sexy it can be to communicate really well. We’re both gamers and I was surprised at how much I appreciated watching him learn a new game. Forearms and brains with a mouse, yum?

They will understand it a little and then think they now understand it a lot. Pure Dunning-Kruger: they will hit a learning spike, internalizing a new concept, and think they get it, and then get very confident. For example, my husband loves mechs (he’s a Transformers/Voltron flavor of nerd) and he thought he understood mechs when we played a round of heavy magnetization with the avenge mechademon and then started playing them in a flow state (which was awesome) but also a bit at random, eg reborn on minions who have the spawn 3 mag. Reborn won’t trigger because mech will spawn too many minions – but this is an advanced concept and it’s more valuable to let them go and then review.

Use each turn as a teaching moment: Show them one tribe at a time, as they play through them. It’s a lot easier to understand concepts as you play through them. Also look for ways to teach an overall concept, eg we played Azurite to teach about tavern buffing, or when I had him play a handbuff Murloc while holding a minion to show him handbuff and the value of holding a card. Consider each round a way to teach a few concepts.

Look for a win to enhance a concept: We played a game with Azurite and I had a turn where I walked my husband through casting spells before buying the 4 cost freeze spell. As soon as he realized what had happened, the concept of tavern buffing leveled up in his brain. I had shown him a new concept in a very exciting way – now we had a huge minion which reinforced the value of Azurite. He then became obsessive over azurite and that spell.  I had to gently redirect him to focus on the shellemental we had. In the final buy round I had to tell him we just want stats now – my smart wonderful husband then sold off all 3 of our golden Azurites (like I said, he loved them) and bought pure stat level 1s for an easy victory.

Review each game: In the mech game, we worked because we had the tier 4 end of turn magnetic buff.

He then wanted to play a bunch of magnetizations as soon as he could – better numbers! We were late game, facing a pretty perfect Murloc end of turn battlecry build. It felt wise to just let him stack stats.

But after the game, I explained the strategy of playing magnetizations as solo units to build up stats and explained about Beatboxer, and he realized the value in building really strong magnetics. Now, he’s pretty much thirsting for that 6-drop: he understands the strat, he now knows the advanced version of it and he knows a key minion he needs to get. He’s excited to potentially get Beatboxer and now he wants to play mags with triples.

He wasn’t ready to learn that mid-game, but the recap got him really excited to learn and play more.

Facilitate communication: for us, me trying to point at the screen blocked his view of the screen, so we decided we needed a pointer. It’s the weekend, we’re kinda tipsy and we settled on using his wand, because my husband is awesome and loves magic so we have a wand which shoots fire. We might have taken a break here to go play with a firebolt-casting wand. 😛

After shenanigans, we then used that wand for the next game. The extra length proved better for pointing compared to finger, pen and chopstick. It was silly, but it worked: it streamlined communication and eliminated confusion. If it works, it works!

We also spent a lot of time reviewing communication strategy. As a doubly neurodivergent couple, we really value being able to quickly convey concepts, so we already practice communication shorthand – it was an easy evolution to simply say the word positioning, for example, to trigger him to think about the layout and order of minions.

I liked this way more than I thought I would is a surprising but key thing which also helped this become a future game for us to play together. Husband has played Hearthstone in the early years and because of that – despite me playing battlegrounds for YEARS next to him – still has the concept of buying card packs associated with HS in a negative way. He hated how it felt like he had to buy packs to keep up, so he was reluctant to event TRY battlegrounds for literally like 3 years before he watched me playing duos. HS as a stand alone entity is actually unappealing to gamers who have been exposed to it already, even though BGs are entirely different. As soon as he realized it wasn’t a TCG he got a LOT more interested and excited.

Be prepared for them to make mistakes – lean into that as a learning experience! After 4 games, my husband felt pretty confident and insisted on tiering up to 4 early – after all, we had dominated tempo in earlier games, so why not chase that same gold curve? I asked if he was certain and had him look at his board again. He really liked tiering up, and really wanted to go for it, so I said sure, let’s see how it goes. Remember that your board may be a bit weak, we don’t really have scaling yet.

So he tiered up and found a nice core dragon minion, but tempo overtook us. At the end, I asked “do you think we should have tiered up?” and he replied (and I’m obviously quoting verbatim) “on reflection, dear lady, I wasn’t strong enough to take advantage of the higher tier.” 

He knew we made a key play but also learned about how scaling works. And then, he said the one thing that any duo fan hopes their potential partner can say: “I just wish I had more armor.”

Oh baby, just wait….