I wrote a while back about how well I’ve come to know the Thursday group’s habits, how I can call in advance who’s going to torch an alliance on turn one of a negotiation game. What I didn’t mention, because it hadn’t happened yet, is that Renata is capable of doing this to an actual folding table, not metaphorically, with real physical force, and that I now know this from direct experience.
It was a drafting game, one with a real scoring crunch at the end where a decision three rounds earlier turns out to matter enormously, the kind of design I generally admire. Renata had built what she clearly thought was a strong engine, and about two thirds through the game realized, out loud, in real time, that a rule interaction she’d misunderstood had quietly undercut the entire plan for the last hour. Not a huge deal, normally, these things happen, you recalibrate and finish the game a little worse off than you’d hoped. Except Wendell, trying to be helpful, chose that exact moment to point out he’d actually explained that rule correctly at setup and she just hadn’t been listening, which is possibly true and was, regardless of truth, the single worst thing anyone could have said in that moment.
The table itself only moved about six inches, for the record, cards and tokens sliding rather than launching, nobody’s folding chair was harmed, this isn’t as dramatic a story as the title’s promising. But it was, genuinely, the first time in six years of this group that anyone had touched furniture in anger, and there was a solid ten seconds of everyone just staring at the scattered components before Marcus, of all people, started laughing, and then Renata started laughing, mortified but laughing, and the whole thing deflated into an argument about whose turn it was to reset the board rather than whose fault the misunderstanding actually was.
We finished the game, for what it’s worth, Renata lost, gracefully once the adrenaline wore off, and she brought Wendell a six pack the following week as an unspoken apology that he accepted by not bringing it up again. I’ve thought about that night more than a minor table-flip probably deserves, mostly because it’s the closest this group has ever come to actually falling apart over a game, and the fact that it didn’t, that it resolved into an inside joke within about ninety seconds, told me more about why I trust these five people with my one real social outlet than six years of smooth sessions ever did.