Ines is the most competitive person in our Thursday group by a wide margin, the kind of player who’ll spend a full minute silently calculating a trade before committing to it, and I thought that made her a perfect fit for a heavy negotiation game I’d been wanting to bring to the table for months. I was right about the fit and wrong about basically everything else that night, and I’ve been turning over why for weeks now.

The game itself doesn’t matter as much as what I did wrong teaching it, which was rushing. I’d played it twice already with a different group, so in my head the rules were simple, and I taught it the way you explain something to someone who already half knows it, skipping the connective tissue between rules because it felt obvious to me. Ines is sharp, she picked up the mechanical pieces fast, but I never actually explained the why behind a couple of the interaction rules, just the what, and about forty minutes in she made a move that violated one of those unexplained interactions and got genuinely annoyed when I corrected her.

What made it worse is that I could see it happening in real time and didn’t stop it. I noticed her getting frustrated, kept teaching anyway, some combination of wanting to finish explaining and not wanting to admit I’d already botched the pacing. By the time we actually started playing for real, she’d decided she didn’t like the game, and nothing that happened afterward, including a genuinely clever move she pulled off in round three, changed her mind. She told me flatly at the end that she wouldn’t play it again, which is rare for her, she’s usually willing to give something a second shot even when the first one goes rough.

I’ve thought about this more than a one bad evening probably deserves, partly because it’s such a specific, avoidable mistake and partly because I recognize the pattern in myself now that I’m looking for it. I get excited about something, I want to share it, and the wanting-to-share overrides my actual judgment about whether I’m teaching it well or just performing enthusiasm at someone. It’s the same instinct, I think, that makes a bad teacher a bad teacher, caring more about getting through the material than checking whether the person across from you is actually following.

I haven’t tried the game again with Ines and I’m not going to push it. But the next new game I bring to the table, I’m slowing the teach down on purpose, watching faces instead of watching my own explanation, even if it means the first round starts ten minutes later than I’d like. Some games you only get one shot at a first impression, and apparently so does the person teaching them.