Your first game of TAMNA — what the tutorial does not tell you

The first snag is not inside the game at all. The welcome dialog — "🏝️ Welcome to TAMNA!" — appears only on your first visit to the lobby after signing in. It carries a "🎓 Start the tutorial" button, which is the shortest way in. But the dialog marks itself as seen whether you press that button, close it, or simply tap outside it, and it will never surface on its own again.

On top of that, if you have not signed in, the dialog never appears in the first place: the signed-out home page branches to the introduction page instead. So "I never got the tutorial prompt" is not a fault, it is the design. That page does carry a "Try without signing in" button, so the door has not disappeared.

The permanent door is the practice page. There you get two buttons side by side: "🎓 Guided tutorial (~2 min)" and "🎮 Free play (3 bots)". Only the welcome dialog's button skips this chooser and drops you straight into the tutorial; the links from the lobby footer and from the introduction page land you on the two-way chooser first. Both start on the same board, so if you are unsure, take the top one.

Once you finish the tutorial, the dialog's button changes its label to "🎮 Practice again". Since the dialog itself never reappears, almost nobody ever sees that. From your second visit onward, the right move is to open the practice page directly.

One thing to hold on to: the tutorial is not a one-time offer you can miss. The entrance lives permanently inside practice mode, and you can run it from the beginning as many times as you like. Reflexively dismissing that first prompt costs you nothing.

The tutorial is fourteen steps long, and your position shows on screen as something like "3/14", so you always know how much is left. Eight of the fourteen never wait for you to act. On seven of them — welcome, the goal, the placement explainer, the Dokkaebi explainer, checking your hand, the trading explainer and the development-card explainer — pressing Next is the only thing to do. The last one is not a speech bubble at all but a completion card.

The remaining six wait for you to act: two settlements, two roads, one dice roll, and one free build. In terms of moves actually sent to the board, though, there are only four — the opening settlement and its road travel together as a single move, which the next section unpacks.

Here is the part that surprises first-timers. Of those six action steps, exactly one — the free build — offers a Next button. The four placement steps and the dice step show no Next at all. The only other control is Skip, and Skip does not skip the step; it ends the entire tutorial.

So "I am not sure this is a good spot, let me peek ahead and come back" is not available. You either place, or you step off the guided track. What you lose by stepping off, though, is only the guidance. The board survives: the overlay disappears and the very same game continues as free practice. Skip is less "start over" than "take the training wheels off".

The freedom runs the other way too. On the read-only steps the screen dims, but the dim layer does not intercept taps on the board underneath. Nothing stops you from acting while an explanation is on screen. If you are not in the mood to read, you can start building under the dark overlay. The coaching is a signpost, not a gate.

When you place your first settlement, several intersections light up in teal and exactly one of them gets a strong pulsing ring. Read alongside the banner — "👉 Tap a glowing teal intersection to place your settlement" — the ringed spot looks like the recommended one. It is not.

That ring is attached mechanically to whichever legal spot carries the lowest internal identifier. Nothing about the numbers on the surrounding tiles, the mix of resources, or the distance to a Naru enters into it. Its only job is to show a first-timer that these things are genuinely tappable. Placing on the ringed spot is not a mistake, but it is a choice, not counsel. Every glowing intersection is equally available to you.

There is also a moment where the guidance appears to lag. The opening placement is a two-tap interaction — pick an intersection, then pick an adjoining path — but what gets sent to the board is one combined move. So while you are choosing the path, nothing has changed yet and the banner still shows the settlement wording. The instant the road goes down, the settlement step and the road step both become satisfied at once, and the road banner drifts past afterwards, roughly six tenths of a second per step.

The practical rule is short: read the board, not the sentence. What is glowing is precisely what the game wants from you. Intersections lit means pick an intersection; paths lit means pick a path. The banner can arrive a beat late, but the highlights never lie.

On explanation-only steps the bubble sits in the middle of the screen. The hand-check step rings your row of resource cards; the trading and development-card steps ring the build menu. That ring means "this is what we are talking about", not necessarily "press this now". When you do need to press something, the board or the bottom controls light up alongside it.

The dice step reads "👉 Roll the dice to collect resources (no 7s in the tutorial)". True, but far too modest. The randomness used during the tutorial is pinned to a single constant value, which makes both dice come up 3 every single time. It is not that the total avoids 7 — the total is always exactly 6.

And that pinning is not limited to your turn. The same source drives the bots' turns as well. For the whole length of the tutorial, the only tiles producing anything are the ones numbered 6. If neither of your settlements touches a 6, you can roll all day and not a single card will arrive. The hand-check step flatly states that "You received resources from tiles matching the roll" — which simply will not be true for that placement. Getting nothing is not you doing it wrong.

This is also why the Dokkaebi step is pure text. With 7 impossible, the Dokkaebi never actually moves during the tutorial, and the copy admits as much at the end: "(No 7s in this tutorial, but they show up often in real games — so remember this!)". Turned around, that means the first time a 7 lands on you in a real game, it will be something you have never once experienced.

The moment the rails come off is precise. From the instant you finish the tutorial — or skip it — the dice switch over to ordinary randomness. Same board, same position, and from the very next roll the world starts misbehaving. On the completion card, choosing "Keep practicing here" leaves you on that same board with real dice.

That gives the least painful route into your first game. Run the tutorial to the end, and on the completion card do not head for a real match yet. Stay on the same board and keep rolling until a 7 turns up. Watch the Dokkaebi land on one of your tiles once, and get made to discard once while holding a big hand. Do that, and there is almost nothing left in a real first game that feels like something nobody warned you about.

When the free-build step begins, the banner announces "🧱🌲 We topped up your resources!". That top-up is not decoration; it rewrites your hand. The amount is fixed: it fills whatever is missing up to the cost of two roads plus one settlement. Concretely that means being brought up to Clay 3, Lumber 3, Horsehair 1 and Tangerine 1 — and no Basalt is added at all.

Anything you already hold is left alone, so a player who happened to draw well carries a surplus on top. Whatever gets added is deducted from the bank. In other words this step is not testing whether you can afford to build; it is giving you one rehearsal of the act of building. Having built something here is not evidence that you could have built it in a real game.

The completion condition is loose too. Placing any one new road, settlement or city after the opening ends the step. Since no Basalt is topped up, reaching for a city here is not realistic, which effectively means extending a single road is enough to pass. And since this is the one action step with a Next button, you may simply move on without building anything.

This is where the gap with a real game is widest. In a real game your income is decided entirely by which tiles your two settlements touch and how often those numbers come up. Nobody tops you up. Going several turns at the start without building anything is completely normal, and it does not mean you misplayed the interface — your placement and the rolls have simply not met yet.

What to do when that happens is settled: do not let your hand sit idle. Because the trading step is explanation only, first-timers routinely go many turns without trying a single trade — even though the copy itself says "When you're stuck in a real game, think 'trade'." The one action the tutorial never lets you rehearse is the first one you should reach for in a real game.

One difference is easy to miss entirely. A practice game ends at a target of 8 victory points, because the practice game is created without specifying a target and the built-in default applies. When you set up a room online, however, the value the lobby has preselected for you is 10. Same game, but the "nearly there" distance you got used to in practice grows by two points in a real match.

The board is fixed as well. Practice mode builds its board from the same seed every time, so the tile resources, the numbers on them, and the positions of the Naru are identical on every visit. It also runs with balanced generation, which keeps 6 and 8 from sitting next to each other and prevents three or more of the same resource from clumping. That is genuinely useful for learning, since you can compare different openings on one constant board. What it does not give you is practice at reading unfamiliar boards — and online, whoever creates the room can switch balanced generation off.

Your practice opponents are three bots on the easiest setting, and none of it is recorded anywhere. A practice win never reaches the weekly ranking and never lands in your record; neither does a practice loss. Treating your practice results as a measure of your ability is therefore premature. All they establish is that you won on that board with those dice.

The completion card reads "🎉 Tutorial complete!" and offers two buttons. "Play for real!" sends you to the lobby — and here is the trap: press it while still signed out and you arrive at the introduction page rather than a lobby with games in it. This is where the boundary first shows itself, namely that sitting down at a real table requires an account. Nothing has gone wrong; sign in and come back.

The real trick to finishing a first game is not on the board at all. It is staying in your seat until somebody wins. A game you walk out of stops being something you can read back later, and the games you cannot win are exactly the ones where everything that went short is still sitting on the board in plain view. Even well short of the target, a game you saw through to the last move becomes material for the next one. The thing to want from a first game is that material, not the win.