Marcus got me into board games eight years ago at, of all things, a family gathering I was mostly trying to survive, a game of Blood Rage that I only agreed to because it seemed better than another hour of small talk with people I only see twice a year. I did not expect that decision to reroute an entire chunk of my adult life, and I definitely did not expect that the same brother in law who handed me my first draft pick would, eight years later, still be the single worst loser I have ever shared a table with, in the specific and narrow way that only applies to negotiation heavy games.

Give him a euro with a clean scoring track and he loses fine, shrugs, asks what he could’ve done differently, moves on within minutes. Something about a game where another human being has to actively choose to betray him, though, turns him into a man delivering a eulogy for his own trust in humanity. Last month I brought over one of the heavier negotiation games I’ve been reviewing, sat him down, taught him the rules as cleanly as I know how, professional habit kicking in whether I want it to or not, and by round three he had made an alliance with my downstairs neighbor and by round five that alliance had been the reason he lost.

What followed was a solid ten minutes of him narrating, out loud, in real time, the exact moment he should have seen it coming, treating a board game betrayal with the gravity most people reserve for actual life events. My neighbor, to her credit, sat there looking only mildly guilty while eating chips. I have seen this exact performance from Marcus at least six times now across different games and I am fully convinced it is not really about winning. It’s that he commits, genuinely, to trusting people at the table the way he’d trust them outside it, and every game that punishes him for that feels to him like a small personal referendum on his character.

I used to try to warn new players about this before teaching them a negotiation game with him in the group, this is going to happen, don’t take it personally, he does this to everyone. I’ve stopped doing that, actually, because I realized the warning ruins something. The whole bit only works because it’s unguarded. If I coach people to expect the wounded prophet routine ahead of time it becomes a performance everyone’s in on rather than the real, small, genuinely funny thing that happens when a person who is otherwise entirely reasonable gets betrayed by a card game and cannot immediately process it. He’ll deny, if you ask him directly, that he takes it that hard. He does not deny it convincingly. I’ve started keeping a mental tally of which specific games have broken him worst, purely for my own amusement, and I will absolutely be bringing another one over soon, because watching him get quietly, theatrically wounded by a board game remains one of the more reliable joys in my week.