Two years ago, before Marisol had fully converted me to modern board games, I remember standing in the break room and telling a different coworker, with total confidence, that the whole Gloomhaven phenomenon looked like homework dressed up as a hobby. Legacy stickers you can’t undo, campaigns that eat months, a rulebook the size of a phone book. I said something like “I already catalog things professionally, the last thing I want from my evening is more bookkeeping,” and I meant it, and I said it loudly enough that I remember the exact spot in the break room I was standing in when I said it.

I own three Gloomhaven games now. Buttons and Bugs lives in my bag for travel. Frosthaven takes up an actual shelf of its own. I did not arrive here gracefully, either, Marisol basically had to trick me into a single session of the original with a promise that we’d stop after one scenario if I hated it, and I did not hate it, which was extremely inconvenient for the opinion I’d been repeating to anyone who’d listen for the better part of a year.

What actually changed my mind, once I sat with it, wasn’t the bookkeeping I’d been dreading, it was realizing the bookkeeping is the point rather than the tax you pay to get to the point. The campaign remembering what you did, the box slowly filling up with stickers and unlocked content and consequences from three sessions ago, is the exact same instinct that makes me love an object with real provenance at work, a book that’s been marked up by three different owners across a hundred years. I’d been treating “permanent” like a synonym for “annoying” and it turns out, at least for me, it’s closer to a synonym for “means something.”

I don’t think I owe that old coworker an apology exactly, my opinion at the time was honestly held, just wrong, the same way plenty of opinions are wrong before you’ve actually tried the thing. But I’ve started being a little more careful about announcing a strong opinion on something I haven’t played, mostly because I’ve been embarrassed by this exact pattern more than once now, and there’s only so many times you can loudly declare something isn’t for you before trying it and discovering it very much is. The break room conversation, for the record, never got revisited. I like to imagine that coworker is somewhere right now, owning three copies of something they were equally sure about two years ago.