The spreadsheet started because Priya and I couldn’t agree on whether we’d actually played Kemet twice or three times before the Blood and Sand upgrade came out, and I got tired of two people with functioning memories losing an argument to bad memory. So I made a tab. Game, date, who, winner, one line of notes. Simple. It is not simple anymore, six months in, and the reason it’s not simple is entirely my own fault, because I work in claims audit all day and apparently cannot help myself around a spreadsheet once it exists.

There’s a column now for setup time, in minutes, timed on my phone, because I got curious after Dwellings of Eldervale ate forty minutes of a two hour game night just getting monster tokens sorted. There’s a column for whether we used the app companion, because I wanted to know if I actually preferred games with a phone at the table or just thought I did. There’s a conditional format that turns a cell red if a game hasn’t hit the table in ninety days, which was supposed to be motivating and mostly just makes me feel guilty about Vast every time I open the file.

None of this was the point. The point was settling one argument about Kemet. And I could stop there, I could have stopped there in March, but instead I added a pivot table in April that breaks down average rating by player count, and now I have actual data suggesting I rate two-player sessions on average four tenths of a point higher than four-player sessions of the same games, which either means something real about what I want from an evening or means I need to stop torturing a hobby with the same instincts I use to catch a miscoded claim at work.

Priya thinks it’s funny. She’ll ask “what does the spreadsheet say” now before we even sit down, half serious, and I’ve started answering her, which should tell you how far past reasonable this has gone. Last week she asked whether the data says we should play more two-player games and I said probably, and we played This War of Mine instead of joining the Thursday group’s Scythe night, and it was a good call, and I updated the spreadsheet to reflect that it was a good call.

I don’t think I’m going to fix this. I catch errors for a living, matching a line item against a chart note until the two agree, and it turns out that itch doesn’t clock out at five. The spreadsheet exists now. It will probably get a chart eventually. I’ve made my peace with being the person at the table who knows exactly how long the last three plays of Ark Nova ran, even when nobody asked.