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Recently some friends and I got together to play the Game of Thrones board game, but the game didn't happen.
We spent an hour setting the game up, and started learning the rules, before giving up as too complicated.
As the games master I screwed up by not being more prepared (ie. familiarising myself with the rules before hand), but I get the feeling that this might have been a difficult task anyway.
What's the best way to introduce this game to people who haven't played before?
This is a very general question and really depends on who you're playing with (and how they're feeling at the time).
Playing any new board game with a group of new players can be a daunting task, and a lot of players are reluctant to listen to a rules explanation for an hour before you start.
If nobody knows the rules then, unless the game is simple, it's likely (as you experienced) that the group will give up. Unless you have enough rulebooks for everybody, or a really interested group, having one person read the rules in front of everyone is a bad idea. As you mentioned, a better idea is to have someone take charge, and read enough of the rules in advance that they'll be able to set up and guide the learning.
It's fine for that player to follow along with the rulebook. A new player is a good facilitator, especially if everyone understands that they're still learning too. This helps avoid blame where you didn't give them all the options or explain all the rules in advance (and if you did they'd have stopped listening or given up!).
Set up the basic parts of the game and give a brief explanation of what the board means and how the game flows. Then you can go through phases in a bit more detail. Try to mention the various options without necessarily explaining the details (again, this helps avoid the "you didn't tell me that" issue).
Then finish setting up, getting the players to help out (e.g. "can you sort the cards into coloured decks, can you give each player a set of tokens, please?"). This helps everyone get a sense of the different parts used in the game and the names of those parts, which helps understand the rules as you go on.
Then, start playing the game, stepping through the options and details of what's going on. After a couple of rounds you can ask everyone if they understand, and offer the option of a restart. In my experience, most people will be fine to carry on unless they've accidentally devastated their own position, and resetting shouldn't be too difficult.
The most important part is for the group to accept that mistakes will be made. If you realise you were playing the game wrong, let people know about it and move on.
To reiterate the important points:
Having played a first game, here's what I recommend.
Before the game, get everybody to watch this video. The video is 20 minutes long, and is entertaining enough to give a good overview of the rules. The video does a better and more entertaining job of explaining the rules that you will, and will allieviate any 'The games master sucks at explaining the rules/doesn't know what he's doing' tensions.
Go over what all of the orders, and influence tracks do.
Set up the game, and then emphasis the following rules:
Make the quick reference page available - it's very useful.
Start playing. Players should be aware that it being a first game there might be a few rule gotchas that they're not aware of, but they should get the hang of the game by the end of it.
