The Friend Who Hated the Game I Wouldn't Shut Up About

I’ve got 330-some plays of Race for the Galaxy logged at this point, said as much in the review I wrote up a while back, and for a solid two years before that I would not shut up about it around a friend of mine, telling him he’d love it, telling him the symbol-heavy learning curve was worth pushing through, basically wearing him down until he agreed to actually sit down and play it just to get me to stop bringing it up.

He hated it. Not politely lukewarm, actually hated it, said the icon language felt like being handed a foreign-language exam with no dictionary, and by the third round he wasn’t having fun anymore, he was just trying to survive the session so he could tell me he’d tried it and I’d let it go. That really came as a surprise to me, which in hindsight is a little embarrassing, because I’d built up in my head that once the icons clicked for him the way they clicked for me, he’d get it. They never clicked. He never wanted them to.

What I’ve had to actually sit with since then isn’t just “not everyone likes the same games,” which is obvious and I already knew that in theory. It’s something closer to realizing that the exact thing I love most about this game, the wall you have to climb before it opens up, is the exact thing that made him bounce off it completely, and there wasn’t a version of the pitch that could have bridged that gap, because it’s not really about persuasion. Some people find that kind of learning curve rewarding once they’re through it. Other people just feel punished the whole time and never stop feeling punished, no matter how good the back half supposedly is.

I’ve gotten better since then about not pushing games on people past a first real try. If someone plays something once, genuinely tries, and it’s not for them, that’s the answer, and continuing to advocate past that point is more about my own attachment to the game than about actually wanting my friend to have a good night. He and I still play plenty of other things together, plenty of stuff we both like fine, and Race for the Galaxy just quietly isn’t one of the games we play when he’s over. I’ve made my peace with that, mostly. I still think he’s wrong. Now I just bite my tongue about it instead of saying so out loud.