Marcus tried to sell me on Blood on the Clocktower for the better part of a year before I actually bought it, and every time he brought it up I gave him some version of the same answer: it needs nine to twelve people, I’ve got a household of two, that’s not a purchase, that’s a bet on a hypothetical future where I’ve somehow got ten friends free on the same night. I was thinking about it purely as a math problem, cost divided by expected plays, and by that math it made no sense at all.
What I wasn’t accounting for is that the math I was running assumed the game had to live at my house to be worth owning, and that turned out to be the wrong assumption entirely. I finally caved and bought it after running the numbers on how much I’d already spent on a couple of games that do sit on my shelf getting played twice a year, and figured I’d at least try hosting it as an event a few times before deciding I’d wasted the money.
First time I ran it as Storyteller at a coworker’s place, with a mix of people from the warehouse and a few of their friends I’d never met, and something clicked that I hadn’t expected. This isn’t really a game you own the way you own Cascadia, something that lives in rotation on a normal Tuesday. It’s a game you throw an event around, the way you’d plan a bigger gathering instead of a normal game night. Once I stopped comparing it to my usual two-player Thursday routine and started thinking of it as its own separate thing entirely, the value math actually worked out fine.
I’ve hosted it four times now over about a year and a half, and I underrated how much I’d enjoy running it as Storyteller specifically, more than actually playing some nights, honestly. You’re not competing, you’re building the puzzle everyone else has to untangle, and watching a group of people I know slowly work out a truth I’ve been sitting on the whole session is its own particular kind of fun I didn’t expect to like as much as I do.
Marcus hasn’t let me live down the year I spent turning him down. Fair enough. I was reasoning from the wrong assumption, that a game only counts as worth owning if it fits your normal weekly rhythm, and some games are worth owning specifically because they don’t, because they give you a reason to build something bigger a few times a year instead. Took me longer than it should have to see that.