No thanks, I can read faster than they can explain.
I agree that in practice lots of explainer videos waste a ton of time with intros and such, but thirty seconds of good video can easily replace ten minutes of reading and re-reading.
[EDIT] Put it another way: if you're trying to decide whether to get a game, do you read the rule book? I'd put that after videos of play, which are by far the most useful thing for this, followed by written first-time play AARs (a huge step down from a video, but serviceable), followed finally and distantly by the rule book. This is entirely because getting a sense of how a game actually plays from a rule book is hard and slow.
I loath, loath, loath videos, for "teaching" anything. For basically all types of information.
I find the pacing to be terrible, and even if people talk as fast as I read, I absorb almost nothing from watching people play games.
I can't tell if other people are just slow readers, if they absorb visual information much better than me, or what.
Apparently everyone on Board Game Geek agrees with your side of the ledger, in that most board games have ~2 text reviews of the game and dozens of video reviews, but I basically pretend the videos don't exist.
Yes, I bought spirit island since I liked the rules after reading them online. They were so simple yet fun.
> I'd put that after videos of play, which are by far the most useful thing for this
In a video you wont understand what happens though since you don't know the rules, you are just seeing them move around tokens on a board with little context. I don't see how you can understand if the game is fun or not based on that. It is like evaluating a computer based on watching a video of someone using it over reading the specs, nobody does that you read what it does instead.
It takes a hour long lecture to explain a concept that you can learn reading 5 minutes in a book, reading is much faster at getting information, watching takes less effort but also gives you much less understanding.