How a Noise Complaint Turned Into Deacon's Thursday Table

The actual origin of the Thursday table is a noise complaint, which is not the story I expected to be telling when people ask how I got into board games. Deacon used to run a much louder game night at his old apartment, a card game called something I’ve since forgotten with a lot of table-slapping built into the rules, and a neighbor two doors down called it in twice in one month before the building manager had a talk with him about it. Which really isn’t like most people in that situation, but Deacon, being Deacon, didn’t quit the game night. He just bought a house with a garage and moved the whole operation somewhere nobody could complain about it.

I heard this story secondhand at work, from someone in the break room describing “the guy who got his neighbors so mad about a card game they called the cops,” and I remember thinking that sounded like exactly the kind of person I wanted to know. It took another few months before Deacon and I actually worked a shift together and I brought it up directly, half joking, and he just said “yeah, come by Thursday, we could use another chair.” I almost didn’t go. I’d never really played anything beyond what everyone plays as a kid, and I had some vague idea that a standing game night was the kind of thing you needed to already be part of a scene to join.

That first Thursday, six years ago now, we played something light enough that I didn’t embarrass myself too badly, and I remember driving home afterward already thinking about the next Thursday, which for someone who worked rotating shifts at the time and didn’t have a lot of standing anything in his week, felt like a genuinely new thing to have. I didn’t know yet that this would turn into reading forty-some board game rulebooks a year, or that I’d eventually start writing any of it down. I just knew I wanted another chair at that table the following week too.

Deacon’s garage has changed a little since then, a proper folding table instead of whatever we started with, a shelf system for the collection that’s grown well past what either of us expected, the space heater that runs half the year. But the core of it hasn’t moved an inch from that first night, four or five people, no pressure, whatever’s on the table gets played until it doesn’t anymore. I like that the whole thing traces back to a neighbor who just wanted some quiet on a weeknight. Without that complaint there’s no garage, no Thursday table, and probably no reason I’d have ever started keeping track of what I was reading and playing closely enough to write any of it down.