I Was Wrong About 7 Wonders

First time I played 7 Wonders I gave it maybe four minutes of real attention and spent the rest of the game deciding I didn’t like it. Draft a hand, pick a card, pass the rest, repeat seven times, tally up points at the end. I remember telling Marcus it was a spreadsheet with cardboard on top, that the theme was wallpaper over an engine that didn’t care what civilization you were building, could’ve been fruit and vegetables for all the game cared. I was pretty sure of myself about it too. Not loud about it, I don’t get loud about board games, but sure enough that I didn’t touch the box again for the better part of a year.

What changed my mind wasn’t a rules revelation or somebody explaining the deep strategy to me. It was that I kept ending up with six minute windows where 7 Wonders was the only thing on the shelf that actually fit. You draft, you pick, you pass, the whole round takes maybe ninety seconds per player once everybody knows their cards. A call bell goes off between rounds and nothing’s lost, you set your hand face down and come back to it. Try that with Mage Knight. You can’t. I’d been judging the game on what it wasn’t instead of what it was actually built for, which is a specific kind of interruption tolerance I happen to need more than almost anything else I own.

I brought it back out on a Tuesday that was slow enough Marcus and I got through two full games before anything came in, and this time I wasn’t trying to find the deep game underneath the drafting, I was just playing the drafting. Turns out the thing I’d dismissed as thin was actually tight. Every card is a small decision with a cost attached, and the seven rounds go fast enough that a bad pick in round one doesn’t haunt you the way a bad pick in a longer game does. That’s not a flaw. That’s the whole design doing exactly what it says on the box, and I’d missed it because I walked in expecting something it was never trying to be.

I wrote the reversal down in the notebook, same one I use for charting shorthand, because I’ve started doing that when I catch myself having been wrong about something. Not a big production, just a line. First read: shallow, forgettable. Second read, eleven months later: this is the best six minute game I own and I was measuring it against games it was never competing with.

I don’t know if that’s a lesson about board games specifically or just about being tired most of the time and mistaking my own bandwidth for the game’s quality. So what to think, what to do about it, I’m honestly not sure. Probably some of both. What I do know is I’ve stopped trusting my first reaction to anything I play at the tail end of a bad stretch, because that reaction is usually more about me than the box. The game didn’t change between the two plays. I did. That’s a harder thing to admit about a card game than it should be, but there it is.