Priya doesn’t play board games. She’ll play Catan once a year under duress and that’s the whole extent of it, so bringing Arcs home for Thanksgiving, my favorite thing I played all year, the one I’d been evangelizing to literally everyone at my own table for months, was maybe not the gift to the holiday I told myself it was going to be.

The suit-locking mechanic that I find so brilliant when I already understand it is genuinely hostile to explain cold. You need someone to grasp that the card they lead determines what everyone else can even do that round, before they’ve internalized why that matters, and I watched her eyes do the specific glaze I recognize from certain manuscript authors when I explain why a comma splice is a comma splice and not a stylistic choice, polite, present, absent. I kept trying to shortcut the explanation instead of slowing down, which, given the whole previous essay I wrote about not being able to shut off the editing brain, should have been a warning sign I ignored.

We got through one full round of the campaign before she asked, kindly, if we could just play Sushi Go instead, and honestly, fair. I’d made the classic mistake of teaching my favorite complicated thing to someone as if enthusiasm alone would carry them over a genuinely steep initial learning wall, the same wall I complained about in the actual review, and apparently didn’t think applied to my own sister at a table with turkey still cooling on the counter.

What I took away, once I’d cooled off from being a little wounded about it, is that “best game I played this year” and “good game to teach a beginner over a holiday” are almost entirely separate categories, and I conflate them constantly because I want everyone to feel what I felt the first time a mechanic clicked. Callum’s better at reading the room for this than I am, he suggested Sushi Go before Priya even had to ask a second time, which is its own kind of teaching skill I clearly still need to build. Next year I’m bringing something with a gentler on-ramp, and Arcs stays home, waiting for someone who’s already earned the vocabulary for it.