Thursday group is usually loud. Not chaotic exactly, but there’s a steady hum of side conversation, Denise narrating her own plans out loud whether anyone asked or not, Priya needling whoever’s about to make a bad trade. This War of Mine broke that pattern the one time I brought it, and it broke it in a way I hadn’t expected going in, even having read plenty about how heavy the theme sits.

We were playing the campaign properly, three chapters, actual characters we’d get attached to before the game started actively taking them away from us. About halfway through the second chapter, one of the group had to decide whether to send a character out to take supplies from another group of civilians who clearly needed them just as badly, no clean option offered, just a worse choice and a slightly less worse one. The table went quiet in a way I’ve genuinely never seen it go quiet before, not the silence of people thinking through an optimization problem, something else.

Nobody made a joke about it, which is unusual for us, we joke about almost everything, it’s half the point of getting together. The decision got made, someone took the supplies, and the game moved on the way games do, but the mood didn’t fully recover for the rest of the session. We finished the chapter and called it early, skipped the usual half hour of standing around talking through what everyone would do differently next time, which is normally the best part of the night.

I checked in with a couple of people after, not making a big thing of it, just asking if that had landed as hard for them as it had for me. It had, mostly. Denise said something that stuck with me, that she’d expected the game to feel bad the way losing feels bad, and instead it felt bad the way an actual choice feels bad, which is a different and heavier thing entirely.

We haven’t brought it back to the table since, not because anyone said it was too much, more that nobody’s volunteered to be the one who suggests it again. I don’t think that’s a knock against the game. If anything it’s the opposite, proof that it did exactly what it set out to do, and I suspect we’ll play it again eventually, just not on a random Thursday when everyone’s expecting the usual noise.

I’ve thought about why this one hit differently than the other heavy games on our shelf, since we’ve played plenty of grim themes without the room going quiet like that. I think it’s the lack of distance the game gives you. A monster or a nemesis is easy to hold at arm’s length, something to defeat, but there’s no monster here, just other people as desperate as your own group, and the game refuses to let you pretend otherwise. That’s a hard thing to sit with on a Thursday, and I don’t think it should be easier than it was.