When to trust a game's tutorial and when to skip it

I've played enough mobile games to know a tutorial can either save you or waste ten minutes tapping glowing arrows. The difference usually shows in the first two screens.

Good tutorials teach through doing. They hand you the controls, set up a simple situation, and let you figure out the rest. Strategy games especially benefit from this, because the whole point is learning to think.

Bad tutorials narrate every tap and lock you out of exploring. If a game won't let me press a button it didn't explicitly tell me to press, I start to worry the whole thing is on rails.

My advice: give a tutorial two minutes of patience. If it's teaching, stick with it. If it's just holding your hand across an empty room, you can usually learn faster by poking at the menus yourself.