This is actually about teaching Ascension, but Teaching Ascension sounds corny at best, and pretentious at best.
Anyhow, nearly every game I’ve played of Ascension was with someone new to the game. I am trying to make the rounds so everyone gets accustomed to the game. I am looking forward to that mystical 30 minute game. 
Teaching Ascension is a lot easier than some games, like Magic: The Gathering, or any tabletop role-playing game. The rules are very self-contained, and once one gets a few concepts down they can really enjoy the game and develop a strategy. I find the game very accessible that way.
There are two challenges to playing the game, I think. The first is learning the “stack” and where cards go, and the second is applying the exceptions to the rules, i.e. every card.
The card reading is experiential, people are just going to understand it when they read it, or they will have a question, and each time they do this it will make it easier to understand the other cards. I will make a list of the cards that I had questions about in another post. Suffice to say, this is fairly easy to overcome, and I’ve found that everyone gets it about 10 rounds into the game.
The “stack”, or “the order things happen in”, and card placement is the part I find people having trouble with. It is completely understandable: at the start of the game you are asked to shuffle ten cards and draw five of them, play cards from you hand that don’t really do anything except fill a non-visual pool, and discard cards that were never in your hand. Who knew such odd steps would be so fun?!
As people are taking their turn I try to walk them through it, making sure they are placing cards where they should go. My constant excuse is, “It will make sense later.” This is funny, because one hardly has a situation where there is a substantial difference in where acquired cards go in the first several rounds. It isn’t until higher powered cards that affect discard piles and placing acquired cards on top of one’s deck that all that becomes important.
Here are some tips that I share:
- Keep in mind that when you acquire a card, it will be replaced.
- When you acquire a card from the center row it goes to your discard pile.
- When you play cards from your hand they go into play and don't go to the discard pile until the end of the turn.
- The text below the art on cards happen when you play it from your hand (not when you discard them).
- When your turn is over, you draw five cards (some people forget this).
- Draw one card at a time.
- When your deck is empty and you need to draw a card, shuffle your discard pile; that becomes your deck.
- Take things slow; only one thing happens at a time.
Also, to keep people in the game and engaged, I encourage them to recruit Mystics or Heavy Infantry, or to kill the cultist.
After about three shuffles, I think people only need to be reminded of these when they get excited. At the core the game really isn’t much more complicated than that.
In the next post (about Ascension) I will talk about some beginner strategy for the different factions. For a game about deck-building, banish seems to trip people up at first, so I will share how I’ve explained it.