The Rainy Weekend That Started All of This

The origin story I keep giving people, when they ask how I ended up the guy who reviews board games on the internet, is shorter than it deserves to be. A buddy who used to play Magic taught me Dominion on a rainy weekend years ago, that’s the whole line I usually give, and it’s true, but it leaves out basically everything that actually happened.

His name’s Nate, we’d known each other since college, and back then he was the one still buying booster packs while the rest of us had aged out of it. It had been raining since Thursday, one of those Columbus weekends where the sky just commits to it, and I was over at his place with nothing better to do and a headache from staring at a screen all week. He pulled a box off his shelf I’d never seen before, small cards, no minis, no board even, and said something like just trust me on this one, give it twenty minutes.

I did not expect to like it. I’ll be honest, I went in thinking it looked like a card game for people who found actual card games too exciting. We set up on his kitchen table, he walked me through the buy phase and the action phase, and I lost badly the first game because I kept buying gold instead of building an engine, which if you know the game is the classic new player mistake. Second game I understood what he’d been trying to tell me. Third game I beat him, barely, and I remember him laughing and saying that’s it, you’re hooked now, in a way that felt like more of a warning than he probably meant it as.

What actually happened after that weekend is the part that doesn’t fit neatly into an origin story. I didn’t buy Dominion for another two months, I went and researched everything else first, read forum threads about what else was out there, because apparently even back then I couldn’t just enjoy a thing without wanting to know if it was the right thing to enjoy. When I finally did buy it, my now wife was skeptical, she’d watched me get obsessive about hobbies before and this one had cardboard boxes attached, which in a small apartment is its own kind of commitment. She played along with me a few times out of politeness and then, somewhere around the fourth or fifth session, stopped being polite about it and started actually trying to win, which is when I knew it had stuck for both of us.

Nate’s still the third player at our table more often than not, still the one who shows up with something new he insists I trust him on, and it works often enough that I keep saying yes even when the box looks ridiculous. He hasn’t played Magic in years as far as I know. Funny how that goes, the game that got him out of one hobby ended up being the one that pulled me into a different one entirely, and neither of us saw that coming on a rainy Saturday when the only real plan was to kill an afternoon.