The Night Mara's Apartment Finally Ran Out of Table

Mara’s apartment is small, genuinely small, the kind of small where I’d be swimming in boxes if I lived there the way I live in mine, and for years that’s been fine because our group topped out around five people on a big night. Then Priya started bringing her partner, and a coworker of Mara’s started showing up every other week, and last Thursday we had seven people trying to fit around a kitchen table built for four, plus a Kemet box that alone eats up more surface area than most of our filler games combined.

We made it work, technically. Two people on the counter stools, the map board balanced half on the table and half on a stack of board game boxes doing double duty as a side table, elbows everywhere. The power tiles kept sliding toward the seam where the table met the box stack, and twice we had to pause the game because someone’s tea had ended up close enough to the army pieces that a spill would’ve ended the night early. Nobody complained, which tells you something about how much people wanted to be there even under bad conditions, but I spent half the game more focused on not knocking someone’s temple markers off the edge than on actually planning my moves. By the third round of drafting I’d basically given up on strategic thinking and switched to pure damage control, both for my empire and for the table itself.

I don’t think this is a problem exactly, seven people wanting to show up to game night is a good problem by most definitions. But it’s forced a conversation none of us have really had yet, about whether we outgrow Mara’s place, rotate hosting, or just accept that big-box games are off the table now unless we’re down to five or fewer that week. Nobody’s said it out loud but I think we all know something has to change, we just haven’t agreed on what yet.

For now we’ve unofficially designated anything with a board bigger than Ticket to Ride as a five-or-fewer night, first come first served. It’s not a real solution. It’s what we’re doing until somebody actually proposes one.

I brought up rotating hosts on the drive home with Priya, since I’ve technically got more table space than Mara does even if my place is further from where everyone else lives, and she pointed out the obvious problem, Mara’s been doing this for years and it’s kind of become her thing, showing up somewhere else might feel like we’re taking that away from her even if nobody means it that way. That’s probably true and I hadn’t thought about it that way at all until she said it. I spent most of the rest of the drive turning it over instead of actually listening to whatever Priya put on the radio, which she pointed out about ten minutes in, fairly.

Easier problems have easier answers. This one’s tangled up with who hosts what and how long they’ve been doing it, and I don’t think we’re going to solve it by just measuring table dimensions. Part of me wonders if the real fix isn’t a bigger table at all, just fewer big-box games until the group settles at whatever size it’s actually going to be, but I know that’s the kind of answer that sounds reasonable at eleven at night and less reasonable the next time somebody wants to bring Kemet back out.