The Score I Reversed After Sleeping On It

I wrote most of my Kemet review the same night I finally finished fighting the rulebook, pencil marks all over the margins, genuinely furious at how badly organized the thing was, and the draft I had by midnight gave the game a three. Not because the game itself had been bad, we hadn’t even played it yet, I was rating my irritation with the document, not the experience it was describing. I know that sounds obvious written down like this. It did not feel obvious at eleven at night with a red-lined rulebook next to my laptop. That whole fight had genuinely sucked.

Renata caught it before I posted, actually, which is its own small vindication of the rule that she reads everything first. She asked a version of the question she always asks, would this make sense to someone who hasn’t gone through what you just went through, and I realized the honest answer was that the draft wasn’t really about the game at all, it was about the two hours I’d just spent being angry at a translator. I closed the laptop and didn’t touch it again until after we’d actually played, three days later, a genuinely great session where the power tile market did exactly the thing I love a good area-control game for doing.

The four I eventually posted is the honest score. But I keep the ghost of that first three in my head as a kind of warning label now, a reminder that the freshest opinion I have about something is often the least reliable one, especially when that freshness is really just leftover frustration wearing the game’s name instead of the rulebook’s. I’ve caught myself doing a milder version of this a few times since, not always about a bad manual, sometimes just about being tired, or having had a rough week at the hangar and bringing that mood to a review that had nothing to do with the actual week I’d had.

I don’t think the fix is complicated, it’s basically the same fix as the second-play rule, just applied to my own mood instead of to the game’s session count. Write the angry draft if you need to get it out of your system, that’s fine, that’s what a draft is for. Just don’t post the angry draft. Sleep on it, let Renata read it, and see if the same words still feel true once the specific irritation that produced them has had a chance to fade. Kemet earned its four fair and square, once I actually let myself judge the game instead of the document that came in the box with it.