The group started because Marcus kept coming into the shop on his lunch break to browse the game section we didn’t really have yet, a single shelf of secondhand board games I’d started stocking almost as an experiment, and one week he asked if I’d ever actually played any of them or just priced them. I hadn’t, mostly. He had a copy of an old edition of something forgettable in his bag and asked if I wanted to try it after close. That’s the whole founding story, as unglamorous as most founding stories actually are once you take the myth-making out of them.

Dana joined about eight months in, a regular customer who’d been buying up our entire fantasy paperback section one series at a time, and I remember being nervous about whether adding a third person would change the dynamic Marcus and I had settled into. It did, and it was better for it, the way a two-person conversation about a rulebook becomes a genuine debate with a third opinion in the room. We’ve had a rotating fourth seat ever since, a handful of people over the years who’ve come and gone as jobs and cities changed, but the core three of us have held for going on nine years now, which is longer than I’ve held onto most things in my adult life.

I think what’s kept it running isn’t really the games, though I obviously care about the games or this site wouldn’t exist. It’s the specific, low-stakes reliability of it, the fact that Tuesday evening is spoken for regardless of what else is happening that week, in a life that otherwise runs on a bookstore’s unpredictable rhythm, estate sales scheduled with no notice, donation boxes showing up whenever someone’s ready to let go of them. The Tuesday table doesn’t move. I’ve built other things around that fixed point rather than the other way around.

We’ve played on a card table borrowed from the shop’s storage room for most of those nine years, the same one, mended twice with duct tape on one leg, and I’ve been half-joking for a while now about finally buying a real gaming table. I don’t think I actually will. There’s something about the borrowed, slightly wobbly permanence of that table that feels true to how the whole thing started, three people who didn’t plan any of this sitting down together because someone asked a question on a lunch break and the other person said yes.