I have a habit of talking about a game for weeks before I actually bring it to the table, which in hindsight is a bad habit, because it means everyone’s already heard my whole case before they’ve touched a single component. there was one game in particular I did this with hard, a heavier strategy title I’d read about, watched actual-play footage of, mentally rehearsed teaching, all before it ever showed up on a Thursday.

when I finally brought it, the reaction from my group was polite. politely lukewarm, which if you’ve spent any real time with people who game regularly, you know is its own specific kind of verdict, worse in some ways than someone just saying they hated it. hating it means at least it provoked something. polite lukewarm means it landed exactly where I’d overhyped it into a corner it couldn’t climb back out of.

I kept pushing it for a couple more sessions anyway, the way you do when you’ve publicly staked something on a thing being good. Marisol, to her enormous credit, was the one who eventually said the quiet part out loud, gently, that maybe the problem wasn’t the game exactly but how much buildup I’d put on it before anyone else got to form their own opinion. she was right and I didn’t want her to be.

I went back later, on my own, and played it again without the pressure of proving anything to anyone, and I actually still like it. that’s the strange part. it’s not a bad game. it’s a game I made the mistake of introducing wrong, dragging everyone else’s expectations up to a height the actual experience couldn’t match, and by the time they sat down to play, they weren’t evaluating the game anymore, they were evaluating whether it lived up to two months of me talking about it. nothing lives up to that.

I try now, mostly successfully, to keep quiet about a new game until after the first play instead of before. let people meet it without my thumb already on the scale. it’s a harder discipline than it sounds, when you’re genuinely excited about something the impulse to talk about it is close to involuntary.

the game still sits on my shelf, still gets played occasionally, still good. I just learned the hard way that hype is a resource you can spend down to nothing before the thing it’s attached to ever gets a fair shot.