The Coworker Who Wouldn't Let Arkham Horror Go

I don’t usually talk about games at work, mostly because the overlap between people who want to hear about a chaos bag mechanic and people who want to eat lunch in peace is smaller than you’d think. But Marcus, who sits two desks down on the QA team, made the mistake of asking what I was reading on my phone during a break, and I made the mistake of actually answering honestly instead of just saying “nothing.”

I was rereading my own notes on Arkham Horror: The Card Game, trying to remember exactly why the chaos bag works as well as it does, and I ended up explaining the whole thing out loud, how it’s a pull-token system that changes its own contents scenario to scenario, so even a simple skill check never fully stops being tense no matter how strong your deck is. Marcus does the same job I do, finding the places where systems fail in ways their designers didn’t anticipate, and I watched something click behind his eyes the second I described the token pool changing composition over the course of a campaign. That’s a state machine, he said. That’s a state machine with narrative stakes attached to it. I hadn’t thought about it in those exact words before, but he wasn’t wrong.

By the following Friday he’d bought a core set and a starter deck and, more alarmingly, a play mat, which is a level of commitment I associate with people who’ve been in the hobby for years, not people who discovered it a week ago over a lunch break conversation. We’ve since run through most of a campaign together at his place, and I’ve noticed he tests his deck choices the exact way he tests a release candidate, methodically, one variable changed at a time, which is either the most efficient way anyone’s ever approached this game or a mild professional deformation neither of us is fully willing to admit to.

What I like about it, honestly, is having someone at work who gets the specific kind of appreciation I have for a well-built system, someone who doesn’t need the theme explained to find the mechanics interesting on their own terms. Priya loves games for reasons that are hers and don’t always overlap with mine. Marcus and I apparently love them for exactly the same reason, which is a strange thing to discover about a coworker over a sandwich.