Marcus has been at my table almost every Friday for three years now, since a mutual friend brought him around during a stretch when I had an extra chair and he had, by his own account, nothing better to do on a Friday. He’s good at games in the way people are good at things they take personally, competitive but not obnoxious about it, the kind of player who actually thinks before he acts instead of just reacting to whatever happened last turn.
So when I taught him Blood Rage and explained, casually, that sometimes losing a battle is the better play because the loser’s reward can outweigh the winner’s, something in him just stopped working right. He kept fighting to win every combat anyway, kept getting visibly annoyed when it cost him the game, and after three sessions of watching this happen he said, only half joking, that he needed a break from my table for a while. He took almost a full month.
I felt genuinely bad about it, not because I’d done anything wrong exactly, but because I’d introduced something that broke a rule he’d apparently been running his whole competitive life on, that winning the fight in front of you is always correct. Watching him struggle with a game that kept insisting otherwise was like watching someone get corrected on something they’d never questioned, and correction like that doesn’t always land as fun in the moment even when the game itself is fun.
He came back eventually, texted me out of nowhere asking if we could run it again, and this time something had clicked somewhere in the month off. He lost a fight on purpose in round two, grinned about it, and won the game. I don’t think I’ve seen him enjoy losing a battle that much before or since. We’ve played it four more times since then and it’s become something close to his favorite game on my shelf, which is a strange arc for something that briefly cost me a Friday regular.
What I keep thinking about is how much of teaching a new game is actually just teaching someone to let go of an assumption they didn’t know they were carrying, and how that can genuinely need a month to sit before it lands, not just a better explanation on my part. I’ve gotten more careful since then about warning people, gently, before I teach something that’s going to ask them to unlearn a habit rather than just learn a rule. Marcus still gives me a hard time about it. I think he’s a little proud of the month he took, honestly, like it proves something about how seriously he was taking the game in the first place.