I’ve mentioned Marcus a few times on here, coworker of mine, the one who actually got me into this hobby in the first place, and I realized I’ve never told the actual story of how that happened or how it turned into the thing Renata and I do together now. Worth telling properly once.
It started on a slow Tuesday overnight, the kind where the trucks are running light and there’s real dead time on break, and Marcus brought in a game to kill time, I don’t even remember which one exactly, something small and quick that fit a break-room table. We played it a couple times through the shift and I went home thinking about it more than I expected to for something that took fifteen minutes to teach. Started asking Marcus for recommendations after that, bought a couple things on my own, and within a year I had enough of a shelf that Renata started asking what exactly was happening to our spare room.
She wasn’t a gamer when we met, wasn’t against it, just hadn’t grown up with it the way some people did, board games weren’t really a thing in her house growing up beyond the occasional holiday round of something everyone already knew. I didn’t push it on her early on, mostly just kept doing my own thing with games I’d play solo or bring into the break room. What actually changed things was, honestly, just proximity. She’d walk through the spare room while I was setting something up, ask what it was, and eventually asking turned into sitting down and actually trying it.
The game that did it, if I had to name one, was something light enough to not feel like homework for a first try, and once she got a taste of actually winning at something, actually out-thinking me on a specific decision, the interest became real instead of just polite. From there it built the way anything builds when two people are both into something, we started planning around it, started talking about what to buy next, started developing actual preferences that didn’t always agree, which is its own fun in a different way.
The two-player thing wasn’t a plan from the start, it kind of became the plan by default, our schedules being what they are, and I’ve written elsewhere about how that constraint turned into something I actually value instead of resenting. But underneath all of that is just this: a guy brought a game into a break room on a slow night nine-ish years ago, and it eventually became the main thing my wife and I do together on our short overlapping windows of free time. Marcus takes credit for it constantly, and honestly, he’s earned it.