Denise, two desks over in claims audit, asked me what I actually do on weekends back in the spring, one of those small talk questions people ask without expecting a real answer, and I gave her one anyway. Board games, I said, a Thursday group, a two-player rotation with a friend, a whole shelf of the stuff. She laughed, said her kids had a copy of some fantasy war game sitting in a closet that nobody in the family had ever opened because the rulebook looked terrifying, and somehow within a week I’d volunteered to bring a lighter game in and teach it during our shared lunch break.

I brought Kemet: Blood and Sand, which in hindsight was an odd choice for a forty five minute lunch window, but it was fresh in my head from a Thursday session and I wanted to share something I actually loved instead of defaulting to whatever felt safest. We set up on the break room table, pushed two others together, and I taught the compressed version, skip the full power tile explanation, focus on the core action selection, promise everyone we’d layer in more once the basics landed. Three people from claims and one from the floor above joined in, half of them visibly nervous about “a war game” the way people are nervous about anything with minis on the box.

It went better than I expected and also confirmed something I already half knew, that teaching a game at work is a genuinely different skill than teaching it to Priya or the Thursday group, who already trust that I’ll get them to something fun eventually even through a clunky explanation. A room of coworkers on their lunch break has less patience for fumbling and less shared context to fall back on, and I found myself cutting corners I wouldn’t normally cut, skipping the market tile explanation entirely and just telling people “trust me, take the aggressive tile if you’re not sure.”

We didn’t finish the game, obviously, forty five minutes isn’t enough even for the compressed version, but three people asked when we’re doing it again, and Denise actually went home and cracked open that closet game with her kids that same week, which might be the actual best outcome of the whole thing. I’ve since learned my lesson about game length for a lunch break. Next time it’s something that fits in thirty minutes with room to spare, whatever the cost to my own preference for the heavier stuff.