Marisol and I have a rule, mostly unspoken until I’m about to break it, that new games get taught honestly, meaning I’m not allowed to pick the faction I already understand and hand her the one I’ve never touched, because that’s not teaching, that’s just winning with extra steps. I broke the rule for Root. I took the Marquise, the faction I’d read the rules for twice already, and gave her the Eyrie, the one with the escalating forced-decree rulebook that punishes you for changing your mind mid-game, and I told myself this was fine because somebody had to run the complicated faction and I understood it better.

She figured out about forty minutes in that her deck of forced decrees was basically a trap she’d set for herself at the start of the game, add a card to your own to-do list every turn, fail to complete the list and the whole thing collapses into a court-turmoil death spiral, and there is nothing quite like watching someone realize a system betrayed them slowly over the course of an hour rather than all at once. She didn’t yell. She’s not a yeller. She just got very quiet, moved her last pieces with a kind of grim, deliberate slowness, and said “so I basically wrote my own punishment three turns ago and there was nothing I could do about it,” which, yes, correct, that is in fact the design, and I picked a genuinely terrible night to not mention that clearly up front.

I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t just say it plainly before we started, and the honest answer is I wanted to see if she’d figure the trap out herself, which is a bad instinct to bring into a board game with someone you live with. It’s the same instinct that makes me a slightly insufferable rules arbiter at Tuesday game night, wanting people to arrive at the correct read on their own instead of just telling them, except at game night everyone signed up for that kind of night. At home, with the person who does the dishes when I’ve had a long week of transit meetings, that instinct needs a leash.

We played again two weeks later, this time with me taking the Eyrie myself so I’d actually feel the trap from the inside, and it turns out feeling your own forced decree deck collapse under you is a genuinely different experience than watching it happen to someone else with mild academic curiosity. I understood, immediately and completely, why she’d gone quiet. It’s an awful, well designed feeling, the game closing a door you built yourself three turns ago, and I apologized properly for the first playthrough that same night, mid game, board still out.

She still won’t play the Eyrie again. I don’t blame her. I’ve retired that faction from our house rotation entirely, not because the design’s bad, it’s actually the best idea in the box, but because some games are better taught to a stranger you’ll never live with than to the person whose evening you’re actually responsible for.