Teaching Priya a Game I Loved, and Watching Her Pick It Apart

I’d been sitting on a game for a couple weeks, one I’d played twice solo-testing the rules before bringing it to the table, feeling pretty confident I understood it well enough to teach it and that the design itself was sound. Brought it to a Tuesday session expecting maybe some rules questions and not much else. Priya found a real problem with it inside the first game, and I want to walk through what actually happened because it’s stuck with me.

The game’s a drafting design, small hand of cards redrafted every round, and on paper the redraft is supposed to create tension because you’re choosing what to pass along to the player on your left knowing they’ll use it against you eventually. Twenty minutes in, Priya started doing something I hadn’t tried in my solo runs: deliberately holding back a strong card two rounds in a row, eating a worse immediate turn, specifically to deny it from cycling back to a particular seat before the redraft reset. It worked. It broke the intended tempo of the whole system, and once she’d shown the table it was possible, Marcus started doing a version of it too by the third game.

My first reaction, honestly, was a little defensive, the kind of quiet flinch you get when someone finds the flaw in something you’d already decided was good. I’d tested this. I’d thought about it. And a newer player at the table found the seam in one sitting that I’d missed across two solo runs.

But sitting with it after, I think what actually happened is more interesting than just “I missed something.” Solo-testing a drafting game is almost a contradiction, the whole mechanism depends on adversarial intent from other seats, and testing it against yourself removes exactly the ingredient that makes it work or break. I wasn’t careless, I was testing the wrong thing the whole time. Priya wasn’t smarter than me here so much as she was doing the one thing my test method structurally couldn’t do, actually wanting to deny me something.

I’ve started doing a version of what I’d call a hostile pass now before I bring anything drafting-heavy to the table, specifically trying to think like the most spiteful possible version of an opponent instead of a reasonable one. Caught two more issues that way since, on different games, before anyone else had to find them for me. Small process fix. Feels like it should’ve been obvious sooner, the same way the insert tolerances did.

Priya still brings up that first game sometimes, not unkindly, just as a reference point, “remember when I broke your draft in one sitting.” I’ve decided to take it as a compliment about the group rather than an insult about the design. Mostly.