Before Denny, I didn’t really play board games. I’d played the standard stuff growing up, Monopoly at a relative’s house, whatever cards games get passed around a family gathering, but nothing that would’ve made me call myself a hobbyist. Denny’s the one who changed that, and it happened almost by accident, on a slow Tuesday shift about six years ago now, back when it was just the two of us most nights and a rotating third.
He’d been playing a two-player card game with a guy on the previous crew who’d since transferred out, and he brought it in on a whim, half expecting me to say no, figuring a shift’s worth of downtime was as good a time as any to see if I’d bite. I don’t even remember agreeing, honestly, so much as just not saying no fast enough, and we played through most of a round between rounds on our walkthroughs, picking it back up every time we came back to the control room. It wasn’t a great game, looking back on it now with six years of better games under my belt, but it was the right game at the right moment, small enough to fit into fragments of a shift, simple enough that I could learn it without a real investment of attention I didn’t have to spare that night.
What actually hooked me wasn’t the game itself, it was watching Denny explain a rule to me and get it wrong on the first try, then catch his own mistake mid-explanation and correct it without any embarrassment about it, just matter-of-fact, I mean, oh wait, no, it’s actually this. I liked that. I liked that there was a right answer buried in a rulebook somewhere and that getting it wrong wasn’t a big deal, you just went and found the actual answer and moved on. That’s basically become my whole relationship to this hobby since, the puzzle of getting the rules exactly right sitting right alongside the puzzle the game itself is asking you to solve.
Six years on, Denny and I still play together more than with anyone else, even with Marcus in the mix now and Ruthie starting to learn. He doesn’t read reviews, doesn’t follow the hobby online the way I’ve started to, he just likes sitting across a table from someone and figuring a system out together, which if I’m honest is probably closer to the actual heart of why any of this matters than my logbook and my ratings and my increasingly particular opinions about rulebook clarity. I’ve built a whole identity around this hobby at this point, a site, a reading habit, quirks other people apparently notice enough to comment on. None of it happens without a guy bringing a card game to a slow Tuesday shift because his usual partner had quit and he didn’t want to play alone.