There’s a deckbuilder I’ve talked about here before that I still genuinely love, and for about a year I pushed it on basically everyone in my life who’d sit still long enough to be taught it, coworkers, my sister when she visited, a friend of Marcus’s I’d met exactly twice. My hit rate on actually converting anyone was, I’ve had to admit recently, close to zero, and it took me embarrassingly long to stop blaming the audience.

The pattern was always the same. I’d teach it, genuinely well I thought, I’d walk through the no-shuffling mechanic that makes the whole thing click for me, watch the person nod along, play through a full game, and then get some version of “that was fine” at the end, which in retrospect is the politest possible way to say a game didn’t land. My sister actually said, gently, that she felt like she was doing homework the whole time, working out the optimal card order instead of just playing, and I remember being almost offended on the game’s behalf before I let myself actually sit with what she’d said.

What I think happened, and this took me an uncomfortably long time to work out, is that the exact thing I love about the game, that you can sequence your deck with real precision instead of hoping a good draw comes back around, is the same thing that makes it feel like a math problem to someone who isn’t already wired to enjoy that kind of optimization. I’ve built a whole career around being comfortable with probability and precise planning under uncertainty, and I think I mistook my own occupational taste for a universal one, assumed that the satisfaction I get from solving the deckbuilding puzzle was self-evidently fun rather than a specific flavor of fun that not everyone shares.

I still love the game. I haven’t stopped playing it, and I haven’t sold my copy, which given my rule about never rebuying something I’ve sold is probably a sign of how much I mean that. What I’ve stopped doing is the evangelizing, the actively pushing it on people who haven’t asked, because I finally clocked that the thing I was really doing wasn’t sharing something I loved, it was asking people to validate my own taste by liking it too, which is a much needier thing to want from a board game night than I’d have admitted out loud a year ago.

Ines, for what it’s worth, tried it once and said almost exactly what my sister said. I’ve stopped taking that as information about the game and started taking it as information about myself, which is a less comfortable but probably more useful way to read it.