After the whole business with Jonah’s sister and Android: Netrunner, which I’ve already written about here and am not eager to relitigate in detail again, I did the thing that apparently happens whenever I fail at something in a way that bothers me. I built a system to make sure I could measure it next time instead of just feeling vaguely bad about it in the moment. Specifically, I started timing how long it actually takes me to teach a game before the first turn starts, phone timer running from “okay so here’s how this works” to the first real decision someone else at the table makes.

The data, such as it is, has been genuinely useful, which surprised me a little given how the habit started as something closer to penance than research. Faraway clocks in under three minutes almost every time, which tracks with how I described it in the actual review. Summoner Wars, despite feeling simple once you’re playing it, regularly runs eight to ten minutes before a new player’s making confident independent choices instead of ones I’m still nudging along. The real outlier was Netrunner, unsurprisingly, which I’ve never gotten a new-to-both-sides player through in under twenty-five minutes, and that number alone probably should have told me everything I needed to know before I ever sat Jonah’s sister down in front of it.

What I’ve started doing with the numbers, once I had a few months of them, is using the teach time as an actual filter for picking what to bring to a night with someone new, rather than picking whatever I’m personally excited about that week and hoping for the best. It sounds obvious written down like that. It was not obvious to me in the moment, apparently, given how badly that one night went. Priya finds the whole spreadsheet a little much, and has pointed out, fairly, that I don’t time how long it takes her to explain something to me, which is true and probably says something about where my anxiety actually lives.

I don’t think this makes me a better game night host in some dramatic way. Mostly it’s just kept me from repeating one specific, avoidable mistake, and given me a slightly more honest sense of my own habits than the vague “oh that one’s pretty quick to teach” I’d have said before I started actually checking. Small system, narrow purpose, and I’ll take it over trusting my own memory of how a teach went, which the reading notebook’s already taught me not to do.