Marcus works the shift that overlaps mine for about an hour most nights, the handoff window where we’re both technically on the floor and mostly just trading notes on whatever ticket queue is on fire. About six years ago, back when I was still new enough to the job that I hadn’t figured out how to fill the dead stretches, he started bringing a little travel case to the break room, this tiny two-player card game that fit in a box smaller than a deck of playing cards, and one slow Tuesday he just slid it across the table and said, you’ve got twenty minutes, want to learn something.
I did not expect to care. I’d grown up thinking board games meant Monopoly at a family gathering that always ended with somebody storming off, or Risk taking four hours to determine that my cousin was, once again, insufferable when winning. This was neither of those things. It was small and sharp and over in fifteen minutes and I lost badly and asked to play again immediately, which I think is the actual tell for whether a game’s any good, not whether you win, whether you want to run it back the second it’s over.
That one game turned into him lending me a heavier one the next week, and then me buying my own copy of something because I didn’t want to keep borrowing his, and then somewhere in there I was the guy checking new release lists on my day off, which is not a version of myself I saw coming. Marcus still works the handoff shift. He’s still the reason there’s a shelf of games in my apartment instead of just books, and I’ve told him that directly exactly once, in the kind of overly sincere way you can only manage at four in the morning when you’re both too tired to be embarrassed about it.
What I think about now, six years and a genuinely stupid number of plays later, is how much of this hobby runs on exactly that kind of handoff, one person deciding you specifically, not people in general, might like this specific thing, and being right. I’ve tried to pay it forward with my own group since, tried a few times to be the person who slides something across a table at the right moment, and it doesn’t always land, some people just don’t have the itch. But when it does land, when someone I introduced something to comes back the next week already thinking about strategy, I get why Marcus kept bringing that little deck to a break room full of people who mostly just wanted coffee and silence.
He’s moved on to Frosthaven now, by the way. I’m still working through Gloomhaven. He will not stop bringing it up.