Something happens to your brain after enough overnight shifts triaging animals that come through the door in whatever order the universe feels like sending them, and I didn’t notice it bleeding into game night until Mara pointed it out, kind of annoyed, over a rules dispute in Ark Nova a few months back. We’d hit a weird edge case, something about whether a specific sponsor card’s bonus applied before or after another action resolved, and instead of just looking it up like a normal person I apparently went into this clipped, almost clinical mode, ranked the possible interpretations by how much they’d actually change the outcome, and picked the one that mattered least to argue about first. Mara said, and I’m quoting her here because it stuck, “you’re triaging our board game right now, you know that right.”

I didn’t know that, actually, not until she said it, but she wasn’t wrong. Triage is just deciding what needs attention now versus what can wait, the bleeding dog before the itchy ear, and it turns out that instinct doesn’t have an off switch just because the stakes dropped from a life to whether someone gets an extra reputation point. I catch myself doing it constantly now that I’m looking for it, sorting problems by actual consequence instead of by how loud they are, which is a genuinely useful skill at work and a mildly insufferable one at a kitchen table on a Tuesday night.

The other place it shows up is teaching a new game, which I’m apparently bad at doing gently. Ferris, who trained me back when I started at the clinic, used to say you explain the emergency in the order the owner needs to hear it, not the order it happened in, lead with what’s actually wrong, backfill the story after. I do the same thing teaching rules now, I’ll skip the setup narrative entirely and just tell you the one thing that’ll actually trip you up on turn one, which Mara says makes me a great teacher for people who already sort of know what they’re doing and a slightly terrifying one for actual beginners, since I’ve apparently skipped past explaining what a “worker” even is more than once assuming everyone already knows.

I don’t think this is a complaint about my job bleeding into my hobby, honestly, most nights I like that the two things talk to each other. There’s a specific kind of calm that comes from treating a rules disagreement the exact same way I’d treat a mildly concerning but not urgent symptom, gather what you actually know, rule out the scary stuff first, don’t panic about the rest. It’s just a strange thing to notice about yourself at eleven at night, elbow deep in a euro game’s edge case, that the same part of your brain that decided an hour ago whether a cat needed to be seen before a dog is now deciding whether a sponsor bonus resolves before or after a conservation point gets scored.

Mara’s take, for what it’s worth, is that I should maybe just look things up in the rulebook like everyone else does. She’s probably right. I’m working on it. Slowly.