Night shift at the plant is a small crew, three of us most nights, and it turns over rarely enough that a new hire is a genuine event. Marcus started in March, transferred in from a plant two counties over, and for his first four shifts he was polite and quiet and mostly kept to himself during the slow stretches, which is completely normal, you don’t know anybody yet and the building is different from whatever you’re used to. I didn’t think much of it either way.
Then on shift five I saw a corner of foam sticking out of the top of his backpack, the kind of die-cut insert you get in a deluxe board game box, and I asked him about it before I’d even really decided to. Turned out he’d been carrying a travel-sized game in his bag the whole time in case there was a slow enough stretch to actually play something, he just hadn’t wanted to be the new guy who brings games to work in his first week. I don’t blame him. I probably would’ve done the same thing.
We played through most of a campaign of something small over the following two months, snatches of it between rounds, fifteen minutes here, twenty there, whenever the readings were steady and the plant didn’t need us. It’s a strange way to play a game, honestly, in fragments, picking back up exactly where you left off three nights later like no time passed, but there’s something almost meditative about it that a normal game night doesn’t have. No rush. No one waiting on you to hurry up and take your turn so the next person can go.
What got me thinking about it enough to write it down is how much of my hobby, if I’m honest, has been solitary by circumstance rather than by choice. Denny and I play maybe twice a month outside of work, real sit-down sessions, but most of my actual hours with a game happen alone, or now, apparently, in stolen fifteen-minute windows with a coworker I hadn’t expected to have anything in common with. I don’t think I realized how much I wanted that until it showed up on its own.
Marcus is off probation now, full crew, and we’ve since moved on to a real full-length game that we’re taking slower, an hour or two a week instead of stolen fragments. I still don’t know that much about his life outside the plant, we’re not exactly friends who hang out on weekends, but I know exactly how he handles a tight decision under pressure, and there’s a version of knowing someone that comes through a shared game that doesn’t need much else attached to it. It’s enough. It’s more than I expected from a guy who spent his first four shifts barely saying a word to me.