When I reviewed Faraway a while back I said flatly that it’s better at three or four, that the display of cards to choose from is too small at two players and leans harder on luck than I’d like. I stand by the reasoning as far as it goes. What I didn’t account for, because I’d only played it a handful of times when I wrote that, is what happens to a small-luck game once you and the same person have played it enough times to actually read each other instead of just reading the cards.

Priya and I have put Faraway on the table eleven more times since I wrote that review, almost always as the fifteen-minute thing before or after something bigger, and something’s shifted that I didn’t predict. The luck of the display hasn’t gone anywhere, the cards still come up how they come up, but the actual decisions have gotten sharper because we’ve both learned to read what the other person’s likely building toward from just two or three plays in. It’s turned into something closer to a bluffing game than the pure luck-forward filler I described, not because the mechanics changed but because our familiarity with each other did. I don’t think that’s a thing a review written after four plays could have caught, and I’m a little annoyed at past me for not flagging the uncertainty more clearly.

This isn’t the first time this has happened and it probably won’t be the last. I think there’s a real limitation in how any of these reviews get written, mine included, where a handful of plays with a rotating cast of people gets treated as equivalent data to fifty plays with the same regular partner, when they’re actually measuring different things entirely. A game’s ceiling with a familiar opponent and its floor with a stranger at a con table are not the same number, and I suspect I’ve been quietly averaging the two into one score more often than I’d like to admit.

I’m not going back to edit the original review. The instinct to update the record instead of quietly retconning it feels more honest, and besides, the review was accurate to what I’d actually experienced when I wrote it, which is all a review can really promise. But if you tried Faraway at two, found it thin, and moved on, I’d genuinely encourage giving it another shot after the fifth or sixth play instead of the first. It took me that long to notice the game changing shape underneath me, and I write rulebook complaints for a living.