Priya, who I’ve mentioned before, the one who joined the break-room Cascadia rotation after transferring to overnight, mentioned once that she wanted to try something heavier than the fifteen-minute stuff we usually manage on break. I should have taken that as a general interest and picked something moderate to test the waters. Instead I invited her over on a rare Saturday when Renata and I were both off, and pulled Rising Sun off the shelf, my favorite heavy strategy game, forgetting entirely that I’d written in my own review that this thing barely works right even at two, let alone as somebody’s first heavy game ever.
Setup alone took forty-five minutes with three of us fumbling through a rulebook none of us had fully internalized, since Renata and I usually play it stripped down between just the two of us and I hadn’t actually taught the full negotiation-heavy version to anyone new before. By the time we got through round one, Priya looked less excited than when she’d walked in, and I could see the exact moment the fog of war stopped feeling exciting and mysterious and started feeling like nobody at the table, including me, fully knew what was happening or why.
We finished the game, mostly out of stubbornness, and it took close to three hours for something I’d told her beforehand would probably run ninety minutes. I could tell partway through that I’d made the wrong call, but by then pulling the plug felt worse than pushing through, so we pushed through, and I don’t think anyone actually had fun by the end, myself included honestly, too busy managing everyone else’s confusion to enjoy my own turns.
Talked to Renata about it afterward and she pointed out, correctly, that I’d done the exact thing I complain about publishers doing, thrown someone into the deep end assuming enthusiasm alone would carry them through a steep learning curve, when what actually works, what worked with Cascadia in the break room, is starting simple and letting the interest build on its own timeline instead of mine.
Priya’s still up for game nights, to her credit, she wasn’t scared off entirely, just steered the next invite toward something lighter herself before I could make the same mistake twice. We did Cascadia again, and it went great, like it always does. I’ve since started actually thinking through what I’m teaching somebody based on where they actually are, not based on what I personally want to play that week, which sounds obvious written down like this and somehow wasn’t obvious to me in the moment at all.