For about two years Mara had a whole bit going about my “weird asymmetric war games,” said with a very specific tone, half fond and half genuinely bewildered, every time I pulled Root or Vast off the shelf instead of something with a normal amount of symmetry to it. She’d play along because she’s a good sport, but she’d pick whatever faction I hadn’t already claimed and mostly just try to survive the session rather than actually engage with the strategy underneath it. I’d tried explaining why I loved it, the way every faction is secretly playing a completely different game stitched onto the same board, and she’d nod in the way you nod at someone describing a dream they had, polite, uninvested, waiting for the part that’s actually about her.

Then one Tuesday, maybe eight months ago now, she was playing the Eyrie, the bird faction with the rigid decree system that punishes you hard for repeating actions, and I was the Marquise slowly building up my industrial engine like always. And she got the ratchet effect wrong, took one action too many of the same type, and the whole Eyrie government collapsed in on itself right in front of her, this cascading, almost architectural failure where her own success had built the trap that broke her. She didn’t get mad. She got quiet for a second and then said, “wait, I did that to myself, didn’t I,” and I watched something click behind her eyes that I recognized because it’s the exact thing that hooked me years ago.

She wanted to play the Eyrie again immediately, that same night, which we don’t usually do, we’re a one game a session household most weeknights given how late we’re both starting by the time we sit down. But she wanted to see if she could actually manage the decree system on purpose instead of stumbling into its collapse by accident, and that’s when I knew I’d actually gotten her, not just gotten her to play along. Now she picks the faction on purpose most nights instead of taking whatever I don’t want, and she’s started saying things like “the Woodland Alliance needs one more sympathy token before it can really start hurting people,” in a tone of actual strategic interest rather than someone humoring me.

I bring this up not really as a game recommendation, though it is one, but because it’s rare that something I’ve loved for years actually lands for someone else on their own terms rather than because I talked them into it. I’d tried to sell her on Root with words for two years and none of it worked the way one accidental Eyrie collapse did in about ninety seconds. Some things you just can’t explain your way into, apparently, you have to let someone break themselves on the mechanism until it clicks.

She’s already asking when the next expansion faction shows up. I’ve created a monster, and I could not be happier about it.