Somewhere along the way I started sorting my whole collection into two mental categories, games that work at any table size and games that are, for me, only really good with exactly one other person across from you, and I’ve become genuinely opinionated about not blurring that second category into a bigger group just because more people happen to be around on a given Thursday.

Star Realms is the clearest example. I’ve played it at four before, at Mara’s request, and it was fine, technically functional, cards still doing what cards do, but it lost the thing that makes it good at two, which is the tight read on exactly one opponent’s trade row choices instead of tracking three people’s boards at once and losing the thread of any single rivalry. Mage Knight is similar, though for a different reason, it just gets slower and more diffuse the more players are involved, and the puzzle that makes it sing at two turns into a lot of waiting your turn out at four.

Theo’s the one I play most of these with, which probably isn’t a coincidence, since he’s around every night and Mara mostly comes over on the group nights specifically. There’s something different about a two-player session on a random Tuesday versus the bigger Thursday nights, quieter, less performative maybe, nobody’s telling a story for an audience of four, it’s just two people actually trying to beat each other at something small.

I get pushback on this sometimes, usually from people who think refusing to scale a game up is a kind of snobbery, hoarding a good time rather than sharing it, and I understand the instinct behind that critique even while I disagree with it. Some games are just built for two, structurally, mechanically, and playing them at a bigger count isn’t more generous, it’s playing a worse version of the same box and pretending you didn’t notice. I’d rather tell someone honestly that a game isn’t right for the group we’ve got that night than force it into a shape it wasn’t built for just to be polite about the invite.