Years before I actually reviewed it here, I owned a copy of Race for the Galaxy for about three months and got rid of it after a single miserable session where nobody at the table, including me, could make sense of the iconography. I remember sitting there with the reference card basically glued to my hand, the same phrase I’ve since seen other people use to describe the exact same experience, and deciding the game was simply badly designed rather than deciding I hadn’t given it a fair shot. I sold it at a used game store for less than I paid and didn’t think about it again for years.

What brought me back was Marcus, of all people, bringing his own copy over on a night when we didn’t have the energy for anything heavier. I almost said something dismissive before we even opened the box, some version of “oh I tried that one, it’s a mess,” and I’m genuinely glad I kept my mouth shut instead. That eureka moment other people describe, where the symbols stop being an obstacle and start being information you read at a glance, actually happened to me about forty minutes in, on my third hand, and I sat there a little stunned that the exact same cards I’d found impenetrable years earlier were suddenly just readable.

I bought my own copy again within the week, which is a specific kind of embarrassing, paying full price twice for the same box because I gave up on it too early the first time. I’ve been more careful since about writing a game off after one bad session, especially one where the friction is clearly a learning curve problem rather than a design problem underneath it. Not every game deserves a second chance. This one did, and I’m annoyed at myself for the years I spent not knowing that.

What actually got me over the hump that second time was Marcus explaining the icons out loud as we went instead of everyone silently referencing the card, which sounds like a small difference and turned out to be the entire difference. He’d apparently had the same breakthrough himself a few sessions earlier and had gotten fast enough at reading the symbols that he could narrate them for me while I built my own fluency, and by hand three or four I wasn’t looking at the reference card at all anymore, the icons had just become words the way any unfamiliar notation eventually does if you sit with it long enough.

I’ve thought since about how much of my first bad experience with it was really about the specific people at that old table rather than the game itself, three of us equally lost, nobody able to explain it to anyone else because none of us had actually gotten past the wall ourselves. A game taught badly and a game that’s badly designed can look identical from the inside of that first frustrating session, and I don’t think I had any way of telling them apart back then. I do now, mostly because I’ve since watched myself make the same mistake with Root and Marcus, teaching something I hadn’t prepped properly and blaming the confusion on the wrong thing entirely.

The copy I own now has a small crease on the box corner from a shelf it didn’t quite fit on for a while, which is its own minor irony, that I’ve now damaged the replacement copy of a game I once damaged my opinion of unfairly. Priya’s asked me a few times since if there’s anything else I own that I secretly think is bad because of one rough session rather than the game underneath it, and I genuinely don’t know the answer, which is a little unsettling to sit with. I’ve started keeping a mental list of games to revisit with fresh eyes instead of trusting my first verdict as final.