Every actual gaming resource will tell you Race for the Galaxy is a terrible first game to teach anyone. It’s got an icon system dense enough to need a legend, simultaneous role selection that’s confusing before you’ve internalized what the roles even do, and approximately zero player interaction to hang a beginner’s attention on while they’re drowning in symbols. I know all of this. I taught it to Priya anyway, on a Tuesday, during what was supposed to be a slow week at work.

In my defense, it’s what was on my desk. We’d been trading complaints about a forecasting model that kept underestimating demand for one specific tent line, and somewhere around hour three of staring at variance reports she asked what I actually do for fun, and I said board games, and she said she’d always wanted to try one that wasn’t Monopoly, and the only thing in my bag that day was Race for the Galaxy because I’d been meaning to get a solo game in at lunch.

The first fifteen minutes were rough. I watched her face do the thing everyone’s face does with this game, a kind of polite panic while I explained that the little rocket icon means one thing on your homeworld card and a slightly different thing modified by the card next to it. I’ve read enough reviews of this game complaining about exactly this barrier that I should have seen it coming in real time and picked something else. Instead I just kept going, the way you do when you’ve already committed to a bad decision and turning back feels worse than finishing it.

Then something clicked around round four. She stopped asking me what a symbol meant and started asking what I was going to do next turn, which is the actual game, guessing your opponent’s move, and her whole posture changed. She lost, decisively, my economy engine had four rounds’ head start on hers by the time either of us noticed hers wasn’t converging on anything. But she asked to play again the next week, unprompted, and now Race for the Galaxy shows up in our lunch rotation more than any other single game in my collection.

I don’t have a tidy lesson here about teaching games correctly, because I did it wrong by every rule I’d tell someone else to follow. What I think actually happened is that Priya’s the kind of person who wants to be shown the real, complicated thing and trusted to catch up, rather than eased in with a simplified version that gets swapped out later for the “real” game. Some people want the training wheels. She wanted the whole bike, wobbling included. I’m glad I didn’t overthink it enough to talk myself out of handing it to her.