The Rating I Walked Back

There’s an entry in my log from a little over a year ago, a game I gave five stars the week I first played it, three sessions in a row over one long weekend with Devon, riding the exact kind of high where everything about a new system feels revelatory. I logged it, rated it, wrote a note that I still remember being a little embarrassed about later, something along the lines of “this might be the best thing I own.” I believed it completely at the time.

We didn’t play it again for months. Not out of any dislike, just the ordinary drift of a shelf with too many other things competing for a Tuesday night. When we finally did bring it back out, the shine was gone in a way that surprised me. Not because the game had gotten worse, obviously, it’s cardboard, it doesn’t change. Because I’d gotten a clearer read on it once the first-week adrenaline wasn’t doing half the work of the experience for me. The combo that felt like genius the first weekend turned out to be close to the only strong strategy the game actually supports. What read as elegant restraint on session three read as thin on session eight.

I don’t think this makes the initial five stars dishonest, exactly. It’s an accurate record of what I felt that weekend, and I don’t think a rating has to hold up forever to have been true when I wrote it. But it bothered me more than I expected, going back and quietly revising the number down, because it felt like admitting the log isn’t actually the objective record I’ve been treating it as. It’s a snapshot of a mood as much as a verdict, and I’d been pretending otherwise to myself for a while.

What I’ve changed since is small but real. I don’t log a rating the same night anymore for anything I suspect might be a first-week-high situation, a flashy new mechanism, a strong theme doing a lot of emotional lifting. I wait for a second or third session, sometimes weeks apart, before the number goes in the book. It’s slower and it means I sit with an unrated entry longer than I’m entirely comfortable with, my instinct wants everything closed out and filed. But I trust the number more once it’s actually there.

Ruth’s take, when I told her about this whole process, was that I’d just reinvented a design review cycle for a hobby that doesn’t need one. She’s probably right. I’ve stopped being embarrassed about that particular overlap between my job and my Tuesday nights. At this point it’s just how I actually think, and pretending otherwise was always going to catch up with me eventually.