One thing I find interesting about modern board game culture is how many people consider it wrong to learn how to play a game well, e.g., in response to a question about how often people read about strategy, every response (so far) is "basically never", with multiple people considering reading about strategy to be cheating and/or ruining the game for other people.
I don't think I've ever played a sport where this was the dominant attitude, and of course it's also not for chess/go/bridge/etc.
I wonder why the dominant culture is so different for modern board games than for basically anything else I've encountered.
Of course there are some people like this in every activity, but this being dominant seems fairly unusual. Imagine if chess was like this and almost everyone who started as an adult was below what is today 1000 USCF in strength, and then there were like 0.1% of people who actually tried to move beyond that. That would be quite odd, but it's normal for board games.
@danluu a common boardgame experience is for a group of friends to discover new games together, and have a similar amount of play time
if some players do strategic research ahead of time and others don't, gameplay is likely to be very skewed and in fact often less fun than everyone being new to the game
