The Second-Play Rule

I got burned once, early on, before I had the rule, and it’s the reason the rule exists now. I posted an early opinion on a game after one solo play, said something like “promising but not sure it holds up,” and then played it again two weeks later with actual people at the table and it was a completely different experience, sharper, meaner, funnier, everything the solo mode had quietly failed to show me. Not exactly a banner example of me functioning like a competent adult, and I went back and deleted the post. Nobody but me ever saw the gap between those two impressions, but I knew it was there, and it bothered me more than it probably should have.

Moon Colony Bloodbath is the game that actually taught me why this happens, not just that it happens. Solo, it’s a fine little push-your-luck deck of escalating disasters, you against your own bad decisions. Multiplayer, it’s a genuinely different animal, because other people at the table are actively choosing to make the shared poison worse for everyone, including themselves, and that meanness just doesn’t exist in the solo version at all. If I’d rated it off one solo session I’d have called it a decent filler with a fun theme. Two sessions in, with people, I’d call it one of the funniest small-box games I own. Same box. Wildly different verdicts, depending entirely on how far I let myself get before I opened my mouth about it.

Books are a little different but the instinct’s the same. I don’t post anything until I’ve actually finished, not skimmed the ending, not read enough to have a confident guess about where it’s going. Anathem would have gotten a much worse review from me at page two hundred than it earned by the final chapter, and I mean that literally, I remember the specific frustration I was carrying around at that point in the book, and I remember how completely it flipped once the plot actually arrived. If I’m being honest with myself, a good chunk of the reason I hold this rule so strictly at work too, on a repair I’ve only half-finished inspecting, on a job I’ve only seen the beginning of, is the same reason. A first impression is real data, but it’s incomplete data, and incomplete data dressed up as a verdict is how you end up wrong in public, or wrong on a signature that matters a lot more than a star rating does.

Deacon thinks I take this too far sometimes, there are games I own that I still haven’t rated a year later because I haven’t gotten them back to the table with a full group yet, sitting quietly in some kind of limbo on my own shelf. Maybe he’s right. But I’d rather have an unreviewed shelf than a review I have to quietly walk back later, and Moon Colony Bloodbath is exactly the reason I trust that math now instead of just assuming it on principle.