The Rating I Went Back and Changed

I don’t like admitting when I got something wrong on this site, mostly because the whole point of writing these up is that I’ve supposedly thought about it enough to have a real opinion. But I told a friend flat out, a couple years back now, not to bother picking up a game I’d played twice and mostly bounced off, some area-control thing that felt flat and undercooked to me at two players, and I said it with enough confidence that he skipped it entirely on my word alone. That’s the part that still bothers me.

What actually happened is I only ever played it at two players, both times with the same person, both times low energy nights where neither of us was bringing real focus to the table. I wrote it off as a design problem when it might’ve just been a circumstances problem, and I didn’t have the self-awareness at the time to separate the two. A game that’s flat with two disengaged players on a Tuesday isn’t automatically a flat game, it might just be a game that needed different conditions than the ones I happened to give it.

Months later I ended up playing it again, this time at four, with people who actually wanted to be there and had some skin in the game emotionally about winning. It was a completely different experience, tense in a way I hadn’t come close to seeing before, real pressure on every decision instead of the loose, disconnected turns I remembered. I sat there afterward feeling a little sick about how confidently I’d told someone else to skip it, based on conditions I hadn’t even bothered questioning at the time.

I did go back and tell him, eventually, that I’d been wrong, that it was worth trying again under better circumstances. He was gracious about it, said he’d add it back to the list, though I don’t actually know if he ever did, and I’ve never pushed the point since, feels like the kind of thing you get to say once before it turns into nagging. What I took from it more than anything was a rule I try to hold myself to now, that a bad session tells you about that session first and the game itself only second, and I don’t always remember to apply it in the moment, only after.

I traded away my own copy not long after that first flat experience, which is its own small regret now, and ended up buying a used one back a while later once I understood what I’d actually been missing. It plays completely differently with a full table than it does bled down to its minimum, which I probably should’ve assumed going in rather than learning the hard way. Some lessons you only really get to keep once you’ve paid for them twice.