Tuesdays are the game night that actually happens, the one that survives illness and work deadlines and everyone’s general exhaustion, mostly because Marisol will text the group chat at nine in the morning if anyone tries to cancel. Last month it was five of us, which meant Cyclades, which I’d been wanting to teach for weeks because I love it and because it’s genuinely a hard sell to a table that hasn’t seen an auction mechanic before.

I explained the gods wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, just left out one whole tile, the priest, who lets you build temples and unlock philosophers, an entire path to victory just quietly absent from my explanation because I was juggling five sets of rules questions at once and my brain apparently decided that one could wait. Nobody noticed for three full rounds. We were deep into round four, someone was building toward a win through military conquest, when one of the two engineers at my table, the one who reads every card twice before doing anything, flipped over to the reference sheet to check something unrelated and said, very calmly, “wait, what’s this tile do, we haven’t used it at all.”

I felt genuinely sick for about four seconds. Not because the game would be ruined, board games survive worse than a missed rule, but because I’m the one who reads the rulebook cover to cover before every new game specifically so this doesn’t happen, it’s the whole point of the ritual, and I’d still managed to drop an entire god from a game about bribing gods. We talked it through and decided to just keep going rather than reset, since restarting a two hour setup at hour one felt worse than finishing with an asterisk, and honestly the game held up fine without it, which says something about how sturdy the rest of the design is.

What actually stuck with me wasn’t the mistake, it was how the table handled it. Nobody made it a big deal, nobody insisted on redoing anything, the person who caught it just filed it away as something to try next time rather than a reason the whole session was wasted. That’s the difference between a group that shows up because they feel obligated and a group that shows up because they actually like each other, and five years into hosting a semi-regular Tuesday table, I don’t take that for granted anymore. We played the priest tile properly the following week, and somebody made a point of building a temple out of pure spite, just to prove they’d have used it if they’d known. I let them win that round. Least I could do.