I take some responsibility for this one. I’d read good things about Vast, the asymmetry sounded exactly like the kind of thing our group would love, and I brought it to Thursday night without warning anyone that “asymmetric” here means five separate rulebooks, one per faction, and nobody at the table gets to lean on anyone else’s understanding of the rules to shortcut their own.

We sat down at seven. By seven forty we were still in setup, five people with five different pamphlets, occasionally interrupting each other with “wait, does your faction actually have a dragon in this game,” which, in fairness, is a real and reasonable question given how differently Vast’s factions play. Marcus, who’d taken the Cave, kept looking increasingly unhappy in a way I recognized as the specific unhappiness of someone realizing their role is mostly reactive and they won’t get to do much until other people make mistakes.

Around the one hour mark, still not playing, I watched the group’s patience visibly thin, and I had a real moment of thinking I’d wasted everyone’s Thursday. Priya was the one who saved it, actually, she just started playing her turn as the Knight, made a move, said “okay now you go,” and forced the rest of us to stop reading and start doing, mistakes and all. We got better as we went, the way you always do with a genuinely asymmetric game, everyone’s second and third turns faster than their first because you stop trying to hold five rulebooks in your head and just play your own.

We finished around eleven, later than any of us meant to stay, and it was, honestly, one of the better nights we’ve had, once it actually got moving. But I learned something about my own habit of bringing a new heavy game without warning people what kind of heavy it is. There’s a difference between “this will take some explaining” and “each of you needs to read your own separate rulebook before we can even sit down properly,” and I owe the group a better heads up next time I want to spring something like that on a Thursday.

Marcus still brings up the Cave every few months, half joking, about how he sat there for the first hour doing nothing while the rest of us fumbled toward understanding our own factions. He’s not wrong. I’ve promised the next asymmetric game comes with a warning text sent out the week before, and I’ve mostly kept that promise since.