Picking The Game For Someone Who's Never Played One Of These

Nate’s brought exactly one person to game night in the eight or nine years he’s been our third, and it was a few months back, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time beforehand deciding what to put on the table for her.

You’d think this would be simple. I own probably ninety games at this point, spanning everything from a two hour worker placement engine to something you can teach in ninety seconds, and yet the night before I found myself standing in front of the shelf like it was a job interview I hadn’t prepared for. Too complicated and she spends the whole night feeling pressed for time and lost while three of us who already know the rules wait around being polite about it. Too simple and it reads like we don’t think she can handle anything with real decisions in it, which is its own kind of insulting even if nobody means it that way. I went back and forth for longer than I’d admit to anyone but you.

I landed on Sea Salt and Paper, the little card game I reviewed on here a while back, mostly because it teaches in about four minutes and the decisions in it are real even though the rules aren’t. Good instinct, I thought. Wrong outcome anyway.

She picked it up fast, faster than Nate did honestly when I first showed it to him, and about fifteen minutes in she was making the kind of small tight decisions that tell you somebody’s actually thinking and not just going through motions. What I hadn’t accounted for was that she’s apparently one of those people who plays to win regardless of the social temperature in the room, which none of the rest of us fully are anymore, we’ve all softened into a group that plays for the shape of the evening more than the final score. She wasn’t rude about it, she just wasn’t going to hand anyone a card out of politeness, and by the third round she’d beaten all three of us clean and looked mildly confused about why we were congratulating her like it was a surprise.

Nate thought it was hilarious. My wife thought it was refreshing, said something afterward about how our game nights had gotten a little soft around the edges without any of us noticing, everybody quietly letting each other have close calls we didn’t need to give. I’ve been turning that over since. There’s a version of this hobby where the point is exactly what she was doing, playing the game the game actually asks you to play, and a version where the point is an evening with people you like where the outcome barely matters, and I think our table had drifted so far into the second one that I’d genuinely forgotten the first one was an option.

She hasn’t been back since, work schedule or distance or who knows, and Nate hasn’t said much about it. But I think about that night more than a lot of game nights that went exactly the way I expected them to. Sometimes the newcomer’s the one who accidentally shows you what your own table’s been avoiding.