Naomi doesn’t come to game night often, she’s got a toddler and a job that eats her weekends in a way mine mercifully doesn’t, but when she does show up she plays like someone auditing the rulebook for weaknesses rather than someone trying to have a nice evening, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite things about her. Last month she finally made it back after what felt like half a year away, and I picked something I thought would be gentle, forgiving, easy to pick back up after a long break. Within forty minutes she’d found a sequencing exploit in a game I’ve played something like thirty times and never once noticed.
Here’s the thing that got me. It wasn’t a rules violation, nothing she was doing was against the letter of the game, it was just a combination nobody at our table had ever tried because it looked, on its face, like a bad idea, spend a turn doing something that produces no immediate benefit, purely to set up a much stronger turn two rounds later. I watched her do it and had that specific, slightly deflating feeling of realizing a game I thought I understood completely still had a room in it I’d never walked into.
I want to be clear this isn’t really about the game, plenty of games have some undiscovered line if you look hard enough. It’s about what it’s like to play with someone who treats every session as a live puzzle rather than a ritual, which is not how most of my group approaches things, myself very much included. We have our comfortable grooves, the strategies that work well enough that nobody’s gone looking for a better one in years. Naomi has no patience for comfortable grooves. She wants to know if the thing actually holds up, and about half the time it turns out it doesn’t.
The frustrating part, if I’m honest, is that this makes her genuinely hard to beat when she does show up, and there were a couple of groans around the table when the exploit became clear, mostly good-natured, one not entirely. But the more I’ve sat with it since, the more I think this is exactly the kind of pressure a regular group needs occasionally and mostly avoids, because it’s more comfortable not to have your assumptions tested. I’ve played this game plenty of times since with our usual crowd and nobody’s used her line, not because we can’t, I think, but because it feels a little like cheating even though it plainly isn’t, and I find that more interesting than the exploit itself.
I hope she comes back sooner than six months from now. Partly because I miss her, mostly true friends are worth more than good board game strategy, but partly, I’ll admit, because I want to see what else is hiding in a shelf full of games I thought I’d already figured out completely.