I’d read plenty of warnings before I bought Root, don’t teach this to someone new without knowing it yourself first, and I did the thing anyway where you decide the warning doesn’t apply to you specifically. Marcus had never played an area control game before, and I sat down and tried to explain four completely different rulesets in one sitting because I was excited and didn’t want to wait for a fourth night to prep it properly.

He got assigned the Eyrie, which if you know the game you already know is a bad first-time faction, a rigid set of decree rules that punish you brutally if you can’t follow through on a plan you committed to turns ago. Halfway through the game he was locked into a move he’d chosen three turns earlier that had become actively terrible, and there was nothing he could do about it by the rules, and I watched him realize this in real time at my own kitchen table. He put his hands over his face. He said, and I’m quoting this because I wrote it down after he left because it was too good not to keep, “I have made a decree that is going to kill me and I made it three turns ago and I didn’t even know.”

We didn’t finish that game. Priya was gentle about it, she’d played the Woodland Alliance and was quietly winning underneath both of us the whole time, which somehow made it worse for Marcus, that he’d lost to someone who barely seemed to be trying. I bought him a beer to apologize. He’s played it twice more since, better factions both times, and he’s come around on it mostly. But he still brings up the decree thing sometimes, out of nowhere, weeks later, the way you’d bring up an old grudge that’s mostly a joke now but not completely. I’ve learned my lesson about teaching four rulesets in one sitting. I have not learned my lesson about warning people before I hand them the Eyrie.

Looking back at it, the actual mistake started before we even sat down, I’d read the rulebook maybe twice and felt confident enough to explain it live instead of doing the thing I usually do, which is write myself a one page cheat sheet the week before so I’m not improvising the explanation in real time. I was excited about the box, it had just arrived, and excitement about a new game apparently overrides whatever good habits I’ve built up teaching things properly. Priya picked it up fine, she’s quick with rules in general, and that probably made me overconfident that the teaching itself was going smoothly when really only one of the two people at the table understood what was happening.

Marcus is a good sport about most things at that table, better than I am honestly, he took losing to Too Many Bones in a genuinely humiliating way a few months earlier and shrugged it off within the hour. This one stuck differently because it wasn’t really about losing, it was about realizing three turns in that a decision he didn’t understand the weight of at the time had already decided the outcome for him, and there’s nothing quite like watching that dawn on someone’s face across your own kitchen table. I felt worse about it than I usually do when someone loses a game at my house, which is saying something, because I don’t love losing myself and I’m not always graceful about other people’s either.

I’ve since started a rule for myself, if I’m this excited about something new, that’s exactly the moment to slow down and prep it properly. It hasn’t fully taken. I unboxed a different heavy box cold a few months later and misexplained a whole subsystem halfway through, though by then Marcus knew to ask upfront whether I’d actually read the rules twice or was winging it off vibes.