We’d been playing Twilight Imperium since two in the afternoon, six of us crammed around a table that’s technically built for four, and by seven a storm that had been threatening all day finally made good on it, and the power went out mid negotiation, right as Mara was in the middle of trying to talk two other players into a trade that would’ve flipped the whole political balance of the table.

There was maybe a full second of total darkness and silence before someone, I genuinely don’t remember who, said we should just keep going by phone flashlight, and instead of anyone pointing out how obviously impractical that was, everyone just reached for their phone. I want to be honest that this makes no sense as a decision. We were five hours in already, tired, the board barely visible in propped up phone light, and the actually reasonable thing to do would have been to call it, pack up carefully, and finish another night.

We did not do the reasonable thing. We played another hour and a half like that, phones propped against water glasses and each other’s shoulders, someone’s flashlight app dying halfway through and being replaced by someone else’s, and it turned into one of those nights people bring up months later unprompted, “remember the blackout game,” in a way that a normal, well-lit, uneventful session of the same length never would have. Theo says now that the darkness actually helped the political phase somehow, made the whispered negotiations between two people at one end of the table feel more like actual conspiracy and less like a board game mechanic, and I think he might be right, though I also think we’re both a little bit rewriting a mildly ridiculous decision into a better story than it deserves.

We finished the game around nine, power still out, called it on points by candlelight because at that point somebody had actually found candles, and I don’t remember who won, which tells you something about what the night ended up being about. I’ve thought about trying to recreate the conditions on purpose since then, playing by candlelight deliberately, and every time I consider it I realize the whole point was that it wasn’t planned. You can’t schedule an accident and expect it to feel the same.