Deacon's Rule About New Games on a Work Night

Deacon has a rule about the Thursday table that I fought for probably two years before I finally gave in and admitted he was right. No new heavy game gets taught after 8pm on a work night. Doesn’t matter how excited I am, doesn’t matter that I’ve had the box sitting by the door all week waiting for a chance to crack it open, if it’s past eight and tomorrow’s a shift day, we’re playing something we already know.

I used to think this was Deacon being stubborn about nothing. We’re adults, I’d say, we can handle a rulebook explanation at 8:15 and still be in bed by midnight. Then I actually tried it, brought Frosthaven’s first scenario to the table one Thursday against his explicit advice, and by the time I’d finished explaining the outpost phase alone it was nine thirty and nobody had moved a single miniature yet. We called it. Everyone went home frustrated, I’d burned a scenario’s worth of setup time for nothing, and Deacon didn’t say I told you so, which somehow made it worse.

What actually changed my mind wasn’t that one bad night, it was noticing the pattern afterward. Every genuinely good first session of something heavy we’ve had, Kemet, Spirit Island, the early Frosthaven scenarios once we’d learned our lesson, happened on a night when somebody had cleared real time for it, a Saturday afternoon or an evening nobody had anywhere to be after. The rushed weeknight attempts were uniformly bad, not because the games were bad but because teaching something dense under a deadline turns the whole table into people watching the clock instead of people learning a game. I’d been blaming the games for years when the actual problem was always the hour.

Deacon’s garage isn’t fancy, folding table, a shelf of milk crates for storage, a space heater that runs from October through April because Wichita doesn’t believe in a gentle transition between seasons. But it’s the one place I’ve had a standing weekly commitment to in eight years of shift work, and I think that’s exactly why his rule matters more than it sounds like it should. Friends can surprise you with how firm they’ll be about something that seems small, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand he wasn’t protecting the game night from bad games, he was protecting it from becoming one more thing that felt like work.

I still bring the new box on Thursdays sometimes, just to show it off, let people flip through the components while we play something familiar. But I don’t ask to teach it until we’ve actually got the runway for it. Renata thinks this is very funny given how carefully I read a rulebook to begin with, that I’d need someone else’s rule to remind me the reading isn’t the part that takes real time, the teaching is. She’s not wrong. I just needed to lose one Thursday to Frosthaven’s outpost phase to actually believe it.