Our Tuesday group has had the same rough core for a couple of years now, three or four of us most weeks, and one guy, I’ll just call him the way the rest of the group does at this point, half affectionately, half not, the Closer, who has an uncanny track record of showing up specifically for the sessions where things go badly. We noticed the pattern almost a year in. He missed three separate nights where we cleared a genuinely hard Spirit Island scenario clean, and showed up, without fail, for the next three where we got wrecked in the first hour.

I don’t think it’s deliberate, exactly, or at least I’ve decided not to think that, because the alternative is a level of pettiness I don’t want to assign to someone I actually like having at the table. What I think is happening, and I’ve floated this theory to the group more than once, is that he’s got some instinct, maybe unconscious, for reading the room’s energy before he commits to a night, and the nights we’re feeling loose and confident are also, not coincidentally, the nights we tend to win, and he can somehow tell from a group text thread which kind of night it’s going to be before it happens. Which is either a genuinely useful social skill or a very elaborate way of only ever experiencing this hobby at its most frustrating, and I go back and forth on which one it actually is.

What I do know is that his presence changes how a losing session feels, which is the part that actually matters more than the pattern itself. He’s the one who, three moves into an obviously doomed run, starts narrating the loss like it’s already a story we’re going to tell later, giving the villain a nickname, assigning blame with theatrical unfairness to whoever made the first mistake, and somehow that turns a genuinely bad night into one of the ones I actually remember fondly a year later. I’ve thought about this a lot in the context of my own job, honestly, because a huge part of managing a difficult public meeting is exactly this, somebody in the room who can reframe a bad outcome as a shared story instead of a shared failure, and I didn’t expect to learn that skill by watching a guy lose at Gloomhaven repeatedly.

I brought the pattern up to him directly once, half joking, and he just shrugged and said something like, “somebody’s got to be there for the bad nights, may as well be the guy who’s good at them,” which I’ve decided to take completely at face value even though I suspect there’s more self awareness in that sentence than he’s letting on. Either way, I’ve stopped scheduling around trying to catch him on a winning night. I think the losing nights are actually where he’s doing his best work, and I’d rather have him there for those than trade him for a slightly better win rate.