I know a lot of people learn a new game by playing the solo mode a few times first, quietly working out the rules against a bot before bringing it to the table, and I understand the appeal completely. It’s lower stakes. Nobody’s watching you flip back to page fourteen for the third time. But I won’t do it, and I’ve turned down genuinely strong solo modes, Ark Nova’s included, specifically to avoid learning a game that way, and I think the reason is worth actually writing down instead of just being a reflexive preference.

A rulebook read alone, or a solo playthrough, teaches you the mechanics in isolation. It doesn’t teach you the thing I actually care about, which is what the game does to the people at the table with you. Does it make Priya lean forward. Does it generate the kind of argument at Thursday night where two people are half laughing while insisting the other one is wrong about a card. That information only exists in a room with other people in it, and if I’ve already burned my first exposure to a game learning it alone, I’ve spent the one truly fresh first-play experience on nobody but myself.

There’s a selfishness argument against my position too, and I want to be fair to it. Learning solo first means you teach the group a cleaner rules explanation, fewer mistakes, less fumbling, which genuinely is worth something on a Thursday night where people have work in the morning. I don’t have a great counter to that except that I think the fumbling is part of it. My dad won Scythe by accident partly because I was still shaky on a rule myself when I taught it to him, and that shared uncertainty, both of us feeling our way through it, is a real ingredient, not just a flaw in my teaching.

So I keep doing it the harder way. First play, cold, with whoever’s at the table, rulebook open and everyone’s patience running a little thin for the first twenty minutes. It’s not efficient. Priya has told me more than once that I’d save the group real time by prepping ahead, and she’s right, and I’m going to keep not doing it anyway, because the version of a game I actually want to review is the one that survives a room full of people learning it together, not the clean one I’d get by rehearsing alone first.