Dana had never played anything with a hex grid before Frosthaven showed up in my apartment, which surprised me a little given how long we’ve been gaming together, but her background is mostly in the lighter Euro side of the hobby, worker placement, tile-laying, nothing with a battlemap and initiative order and a hand of cards you’re programming two turns ahead. I offered to teach her something smaller first, one of the campfire scenarios from Buttons & Bugs maybe, and she said no, she wanted to learn on the real thing, the box that had been sitting on my shelf unopened for three weeks because I hadn’t found an evening long enough to crack it.

We didn’t finish the first scenario that night. We barely finished setup and about six rounds of combat before everyone had somewhere to be the next morning, and I remember apologizing for how long the teach was taking, the initiative system alone eating twenty minutes before anyone had drawn a card. Dana stopped me partway through that apology and said something I’ve thought about since: that she didn’t need it to be fast, she needed it to make sense, and those aren’t the same request even though I usually treat them like they are when I’m teaching something.

That distinction is, I think, close to the whole job of cataloging, actually, now that I’m turning it over. When someone brings in a box of their late father’s books and asks what any of it is worth, the honest answer usually takes longer to arrive at than they expect, longer than a five-minute appraisal would suggest is reasonable. You have to look at the edition, the condition, the provenance if there’s any to speak of, and the temptation is always to give a fast number rather than a true one. I try not to. Dana asking for the true version of a hex grid instead of the fast version was the same request, in a different room, about a different kind of value.

By our third session she was outplaying me, reading the enemy AI decks better than I was, catching interactions in the modifier deck that I’d been missing for a year of play with other groups. That’s the part of teaching something you love that I think people undersell: the moment the person you taught starts seeing further than you did. It happened faster with Dana than it usually does, and I’ve decided that’s less about the game and more about the fact that she never let me skip a step just because I was in a hurry to get to the fun part. Turns out the fun part was always further in than I was giving it credit for.