Our Thursday group meets in the staff lounge, six of us at most around a table that barely fits that many, and Priya is the one who’s ruthless at anything involving set collection. She’s the one who actually taught me Sea Salt and Paper, of all things, cornering me at a game night with a deck of cards and about four minutes of explanation, and I’ve been slightly afraid of playing cards against her ever since.

So a few months back I brought in something new specifically hoping to catch her off guard for once, a card game with a stop-or-push-your-luck structure that I’d read good things about and hadn’t played myself yet. I explained the rules, badly probably, the way you always explain a new game badly the first time you teach it, and Priya sat there nodding along, asking maybe two clarifying questions, and then proceeded to win three hands in a row before anyone else at the table had figured out what she was actually doing.

What got me was watching her reconstruct the whole strategic shape of the game essentially live, out loud, narrating her own thinking in a way that wasn’t showing off exactly, more like she genuinely couldn’t help doing the math as she went. Denise made a joke about how Priya could probably solve any game within one round if you gave her a rules sheet and five minutes alone with it, and honestly that’s not far off from what happened.

I’ve thought about why this doesn’t actually bother me, since by most reasonable standards losing three hands to someone who’s never seen a game before should be at least a little annoying. It isn’t, though, because watching someone that good actually think is its own kind of pleasure, closer to watching a good chess player than to losing at cards. And there’s something useful in it for me specifically, since I tend to learn a new game’s real shape faster after watching Priya break it than I would from another five solo playthroughs on my own.

The game’s stayed in rotation since, and I still haven’t beaten her at it, not once, not even the one time I thought I had the whole thing figured out and she found an angle I hadn’t considered. I’ve mostly made peace with being the person who introduces games to the group and then loses them immediately to someone with sharper instincts than mine. It’s a strange role to settle into. I don’t mind it as much as I probably should.

I’ve started deliberately bringing her games I think are harder to solve fast, not to win exactly, since I don’t think that’s realistically on the table, but just to see how long it takes this time. So far my personal record is about twenty minutes before she’s found the shape of it. I’m not sure that’s a record I should be proud of. I keep chasing it anyway.