I catered a wedding in June that I still think about, not because it was a disaster exactly, more because it was a disaster with a shape I recognized. Cocktail hour ran forty minutes long because the photos ran long, which meant the kitchen sat holding first course at temperature for way past when we wanted to, which meant when dinner service finally started everyone was starving and irritable and wanted their plates at once, which meant my line got backed up right when it needed to be fastest. One delay early cascaded into every decision after it being worse than it needed to be.
Driving home at midnight, hands still smelling like shallots no matter how many times I’d washed them, I realized I’d spent the whole night doing something that felt exactly like watching a badly balanced game unfold, the kind where one early advantage snowballs because nothing downstream was built to absorb a shock. A good system has slack in it somewhere. A good caterer builds slack into a timeline the same way a good designer builds a rubber-band mechanic into a runaway leader, some built-in correction so one bad beat doesn’t just compound forever.
I don’t think I’m being precious comparing a wedding to a board game, for what it’s worth, I think it’s the most honest way I actually process what happened. When I’m running twelve entrees a minute out of a rented kitchen with two people I’ve never worked with before, I am, functionally, managing a system under load, reading what’s actually happening instead of what the plan said would happen, and deciding in real time where to spend the next thirty seconds. That’s not so different from a turn in a heavy euro where you’ve got six things you could do and thirty seconds to actually pick one before the table starts looking at you.
The fix, next time, is obvious in hindsight, which is also very true of games. I’m building a hard stop into cocktail hour regardless of the photographer’s schedule from now on, a real constraint instead of a soft suggestion, because the timeline needs something that doesn’t bend just because everything upstream did. It’s the same lesson I’ve relearned at my own table more than once, that the games I actually like best are the ones with a mechanism somewhere that keeps a bad start from just deciding the whole night. I wish I’d built one into that wedding’s run of show before the flowers were even ordered.
Nobody at that reception noticed anything was wrong, for what it’s worth. The food came out, people danced, the couple’s still married as far as I know. But I noticed, and I’ve been thinking about bottlenecks and rubber bands ever since, which is either a professional deformation or the most useful thing catering’s ever taught me about game design. Possibly both.