Teaching Ruth a Game She Immediately Tried to Redesign

I should have known better than to teach Ruth a game with a fiddly player board, given that she has spent the better part of a decade telling me exactly what’s wrong with other people’s floor plans for a living. Ruth’s the senior architect at the firm, she’s mentored me since my first year, and if there’s one professional habit of hers that I should have seen coming into game night, it’s that she cannot look at a layout, any layout, without immediately identifying what she’d do differently.

We were maybe fifteen minutes into the teach, still in the part where I’m walking through the player board and what each section tracks, when Ruth stopped me mid-sentence and said the resource icons and the score track shouldn’t share a corner like that, it’s bad sightline planning, your eye has to travel too far to check two things that get referenced together constantly. I tried to explain that it’s just a board game, the stakes of a bad sightline are pretty low here, and she looked at me like I’d said something genuinely foolish. “Bad design doesn’t stop being bad design because the stakes are lower,” she said, and went back to her turn like that settled it.

It kept happening. Every game we’ve played since, she’ll finish a round and mention, almost as an aside, how she’d have laid out the reference card differently, or that the box insert wastes vertical space it didn’t need to waste. I used to find this annoying. I’ve mostly come around to finding it useful, honestly, because she’s rarely wrong, and I’ve caught myself noticing the exact same problems in games since, ones I’d have played right past a year ago without a second thought.

What actually surprised me is that none of this critique translates into her disliking the games. She’s beaten me at two of the three I’ve taught her, badly, despite spending half of each session complaining about the production. I think Ruth genuinely separates whether something is well designed from whether it’s fun to interact with, in a way I actually admire and haven’t fully figured out how to do myself. I get frustrated by a bad rulebook in a way that colors the whole experience. Ruth just files the complaint and keeps playing.

The running joke at the office now is that I’m not allowed to bring a new game to game night without warning her first, so she can pre-load whatever critique she’s going to have and get it out early instead of interrupting my teach three separate times. I told her that’s not really how it works, criticism doesn’t have a scheduled slot. She said that’s exactly the kind of thing a person with bad time management would say, and honestly, at this point, I don’t even have a comeback for that one anymore.