Marcus lives one floor down from me and has, for about three years now, occupied the exact same seat at my kitchen table every Tuesday night. He is the person in our group who wants to play whatever is newest, whatever just arrived, box tape barely peeled, rules unread by anyone including me. Usually I say no. Usually I make everyone play something I’ve already taught once, on the theory that a group’s first play of anything heavy should happen with at least one person at the table who already knows where the traps are.

Two winters ago I gave in.

A game had shown up that week that I hadn’t cracked yet myself, heavier than what we usually run on a weeknight, and Marcus was so genuinely excited about it, practically vibrating while I was still reading the box back cover, that I decided, fine, we’ll all learn it together, live, no safety net. I want to say this went fine. It did not go fine. We were two hours into a rulebook that kept sending us backward to check something we’d misread three pages earlier, and by hour three Marcus had that specific look he gets when a game has stopped being fun and started being a group project nobody signed up for.

What I actually learned that night wasn’t about the game, the game was fine, we played it properly a month later once I’d read it cold myself and it turned out to be one we still bring out regularly. What I learned was about the shape of my own stubbornness, that I have a rule, teach it prepped, never live, for a real reason, and the one time I set the rule aside for someone else’s enthusiasm, the enthusiasm ran out well before the rulebook did. Marcus, to his credit, was a good sport about it, cracking jokes about how we’d invented a new subgenre, the two-and-a-half-hour setup simulator. But I noticed he didn’t ask to pick blind again for a good while after that.

I think about that night more than the actual bad plays deserve, mostly because it’s the clearest example I’ve got of the difference between my job brain and my hobby brain actually agreeing with each other for once. At work I would never send an unedited manuscript straight to print because the author was excited about it. At the table, apparently, I’m capable of the equivalent mistake if someone I like enough asks nicely. These days when something new shows up I read it alone first, quietly, pencil out, before it ever touches the kitchen table on a Tuesday. Marcus still gets to pick the game sometimes. He just doesn’t get to pick the night we learn it cold.