It’s a small box. Cute origami art, paper boats, a fifteen-minute playtime printed right there on the tin like a promise of how low-stakes this was going to be. Dana still won’t let me forget round three of the game we played back in the spring, and I’m starting to accept that she never will, which is fair, because what I did was genuinely a little unhinged for a game this size.

For anyone who hasn’t played, the whole tension of Sea Salt and Paper comes down to one decision point. Once you’ve got seven or more points on your turn, you can end the round and lock in what you’ve got, or call “last chance” and give everyone else one more turn, which can double your score if you’re still ahead after, or completely blow up in your face if someone else catches up. It’s a bluffing game disguised as a set-collection filler, and I did not respect that distinction properly until that Thursday.

I had eight points. Comfortable lead. Dana was visibly nowhere close, based on what she’d discarded, or so I thought, because that’s the whole trick, what you discard is supposed to be information and sometimes it’s a lie you’re telling on purpose. I called last chance, mostly to be polite, mostly because doubling felt free at eight points against someone who’d been discarding cards I was sure she didn’t want.

She’d been holding a hand worth eleven the entire time, discarding exactly the cards that would make me think she was behind, and she knew I’d call last chance the second I saw her position, because I always do, because doubling a comfortable lead is objectively correct and she’d apparently clocked that about how I play months before I noticed it about myself. She ended the round the second it came back to her. Eleven beats my doubled eight. I have never in my life heard her laugh that hard, and I have known her since before either of us owned a single board game.

What I actually think about, more than the loss itself, is how much information I’d apparently been broadcasting for months without realizing it. Dana didn’t beat me with a better hand of cards, she beat me with a read on my own tendencies that I didn’t have on myself. That’s a genuinely small, cheap game doing something most much bigger boxes never manage, making you realize the person across the table knows you better than you know yourself, for about four seconds, right before it costs you the game.

We’ve played it maybe thirty times since. I still call last chance too often. She still lets me.