Marcus lives two hours up the road in Indianapolis and comes down maybe once a month, and every visit for the last couple years has included some version of the same ritual: I pick a game I think might actually land with him, and he plays it politely, and by the second round I can tell whether it’s working or not. He’s not a reader, not the way I am, and he wasn’t really a gamer before I started dragging him into this, so every visit is a small experiment in whether this particular design is the one that finally does it.
Sea Salt and Paper worked, surprisingly, given how much heavier stuff I usually reach for. He liked the push-your-luck tension of calling stop, liked that a hand only takes a few minutes so a bad round doesn’t cost him much. Kemet did not work, which in hindsight I should have predicted, since the kingmaking dynamic that bothers me as an experienced player genuinely confused him as a new one, he kept asking why the table was ganging up on whoever was winning like it was a bug rather than the actual design.
The thing I’ve had to unlearn, teaching him, is my own instinct toward efficiency. When Denise or Priya are learning something new, I can explain the rules in shorthand, trusting they’ll fill in gaps from a decade of shared vocabulary about games in general. Marcus doesn’t have that vocabulary yet, so a rules explanation that would take four minutes with the Thursday group takes fifteen with him, and I used to get a little impatient about that before I realized the impatience was entirely mine to fix, not his.
He lost badly at This War of Mine the one time I brought it, lasted about a day and a half in game terms, and took it a lot better than I expected, actually laughed about how thoroughly he’d been outmaneuvered by a scarcity mechanic rather than another player. That’s the version of losing I actually want to teach him, not gracious in some performed way, just genuinely curious about what went wrong instead of defensive about it.
I don’t know if he’ll ever be the kind of person who keeps a shelf of these the way I do. I’m not sure that matters as much as I used to think it did. What I actually want out of these visits is one evening a month where my brother and I are looking at the same small problem together instead of just catching up over dinner the way we used to, and so far, win or lose, that part’s working.
Last visit he actually asked what I was bringing before he’d even taken his coat off, which I’m choosing to read as real progress rather than politeness. I haven’t decided what it’ll be next time. Something with a little more teeth than Sea Salt and Paper, maybe, now that he’s stopped needing the shorthand explained twice.