Teaching Priya Vast Went About As Badly As It Could

Priya started on nights about two months ago, still doing her orientation shifts, and the unit had one of those stretches where the waiting room actually empties out around 2am and stays that way. Marcus had gone home sick that week so it was me covering the quiet with somebody new instead of somebody who already knows how I explain things. I thought that made me generous. In hindsight I think it made me overconfident.

I pulled out Vast: The Crystal Caverns because it’s asymmetric, five different roles with five different rule sets running at the same table, and I figured that would read as impressive rather than as what it actually is, which is five onboarding sessions happening simultaneously under a time pressure neither of us needed at hour nine of a shift. I took the Knight because I know the Knight. I gave her the Cave.

The Cave is not the easy seat. I know that now. At the time I told myself it was the simplest role to explain because it doesn’t have a hand of cards to manage, you’re just placing tiles and trying not to collapse on yourself, but simplest to explain and simplest to actually run turn out to be two different animals. Within ten minutes she was asking questions I didn’t have quick answers for, because the honest answer to a lot of Vast’s Cave questions is it depends on what everyone else is doing, which is a terrible thing to say to someone learning her first asymmetric game from a guy who’s tired and rushing.

We never finished. A transfer came in around 2:40 and by the time we were both free again, neither of us much wanted to pick the pieces back up off the break room table. She said something polite about giving it another shot sometime. I believed her about as much as I believe anybody who says that after a rough introduction to a hobby.

What I keep coming back to is that I taught her the game I wanted to show off instead of the game that fit the actual conditions. Somebody handed me Pandemic on a slow overnight years ago because it’s built for exactly this, four turns, clear roles, cooperative so nobody’s sitting there feeling judged by the person across the table. I had that example sitting right there in my own history and I still reached for the harder thing because I wanted her first impression of the hobby to be impressive instead of workable.

I’m going to try again with something smaller. Not tonight, she’s on a different rotation this week, but sometime. Probably Pandemic, if I’m honest with myself about what actually worked on me. There’s a version of teaching somebody a game that’s really about the person teaching wanting to look like they know something, and I fell into that one pretty cleanly. Debriefing it after the fact is the only part I did right.