Jonah’s been part of our rotating three-or-four-player nights for a couple years now, and when his sister was in town visiting and got roped into joining us, I made a call I still can’t fully explain except that I was excited and not thinking clearly. She’d told us, honestly and without embarrassment, that the last game she’d played with any regularity was Uno, maybe fifteen years back. I had Android: Netrunner set up on the table because I’d been wanting to teach someone new, and instead of putting it away and pulling out literally anything else, I decided this was the night.

It was not the night. I gave the corp-versus-runner breakdown, two separate rulebooks stitched into one game, asymmetric win conditions, a whole vocabulary of ice and breakers and rez costs, and I watched her face do the thing where someone’s still nodding but has quietly stopped absorbing information about four minutes in. We played anyway. She lost badly, not because she made bad decisions but because she never had enough of a foothold to make decisions that felt like hers rather than mine, coached from across the table on every turn. Jonah, to his credit, tried to jump in and simplify things partway through, and I brushed him off because I was convinced the confusion would clear up if we just kept playing. It did not clear up.

What actually stings, thinking back on it, is that I know better. I’ve got a sticky note taped inside a completely different game box reminding me to make a ruling and move on instead of stalling the table, and here I was making the much bigger mistake of choosing the wrong entry point entirely for someone who deserved a better first night. There’s a real difference between a rules-heavy game that’s good and a rules-heavy game that’s a good first game, and I picked the one I was personally excited about instead of the one that would have actually served her.

She hasn’t come back to game night since, which I don’t think is a coincidence, though Jonah swears it’s just scheduling. I’ve thought about reaching out and offering a do-over with something gentler, Faraway maybe, or even just Dominion the way Priya first taught me, but I haven’t actually done it, which is its own small failure sitting on top of the first one. I keep meaning to. The next time someone new sits down at our table, I’ve promised myself I’ll ask what they’ve actually played before I decide what excites me enough to teach.