Our Thursday group has been more or less the same five people for long enough that we’ve developed the kind of shorthand you only get from repetition, who always goes for the aggressive opening, who needs the rules explained with an example instead of just the text, whose turn takes longest and why, none of it said out loud anymore because it doesn’t need to be. So when one of our regulars asked if she could bring a coworker along a few weeks back, I said sure, the way you say sure to something you haven’t really thought through, and then spent that entire session recalibrating in a way I wasn’t expecting.
The new guy was perfectly pleasant, which somehow made it more disorienting rather than less. He asked good questions. He made a joke at the right moment. He also had no idea about any of our shorthand, which meant explanations that used to take one sentence between the five of us took three sentences for the table as a whole, and I found myself getting oddly protective of our efficiency in a way that embarrassed me a little once I noticed I was doing it. We taught the game the way we always teach it, and it took visibly longer, and I kept catching myself impatient with a process that used to feel effortless, purely because effortless had quietly become “effortless for the five of us specifically.”
What actually struck me, watching this happen, is how much a regular game group is less like a hobby and more like a small, unspoken institution with its own culture, and how invisible that culture is until someone from outside walks into it. We have running jokes that took years to accumulate and require no setup anymore. We have a house rule or two that we’ve stopped remembering are house rules, that we just call “the rules” now, until a new person asks why the rulebook doesn’t say that and we all look at each other. None of this is a bad thing. It’s just something you stop seeing once you’re inside it, and having someone new at the table for one night was like getting my eyes checked after years of not noticing my own prescription had drifted.
He came back the next week, actually, which I took as a good sign, and by the third session some of the friction had smoothed out, not because he’d learned our shorthand exactly but because we’d all unconsciously started narrating things out loud again that we used to take for granted, which if I’m honest was probably good for the group even beyond just being polite to a new person. I caught myself explaining a rule more clearly than I have in years, just because I had to actually think about how to say it instead of relying on years of shared context. There’s something almost professionally familiar in that, having to make something legible again for someone who wasn’t there for the years that built the shortcut. I do that for a living, technically, just usually with sentences instead of scoring tracks. It was strange and a little humbling to be on the other side of it for once, the person who’d forgotten how much had gone unsaid.