The Night Vast Almost Worked

Slow Thursday, three of us on, which around here counts as a gift. Me, Marcus, and a newer nurse named Priya who I hadn’t played anything with yet. Marcus had been trying to get a Vast: The Crystal Caverns game going for two weeks straight and kept getting cut off by an actual patient, which he took personally every single time, like the ambulance service was doing it on purpose.

It really had been a while since something felt like a good weekend and not just a week that happened to me, and this one, for a few hours anyway, counted.

We set up in the break room a little after midnight. I took the dragon, Marcus took the cave, Priya took the knight, and we left the goblin faction sitting there unplayed because three was already going to be a stretch to manage with call bells going. I like being the dragon in this game. Nobody expects the room to talk back.

First twenty minutes were good. Actually good, the kind of good where you forget you’re technically at work. Priya turned out to be sharp, she read the knight’s objective fast and started pushing toward the heart chamber before Marcus had even finished building his tunnels out. Marcus does this thing where he gets quietly competitive and starts talking less, which is how you know he’s worried. I was mostly just breathing fire on people and feeling pretty good about my life choices.

Then the board lit up. Not the game board, the actual status board. Chest pain, non-ambulatory, incoming. We didn’t discuss it, we just stood up, and that’s the part I keep thinking about, how there wasn’t a single second of anyone weighing whether the game mattered more. Of course it didn’t. It never does. But it says something that none of us even had to think it, we just moved.

Forty five minutes later the three of us are back in the break room and the board is still sitting there exactly like we left it, my dragon token still on the space Priya had been three turns from taking. Nobody had touched it. That’s a small thing but it mattered to me, that Marcus hadn’t cleared it off the table to make room for something, that it just sat there waiting like it assumed we were coming back.

We didn’t finish. Priya had to clock out at four, Marcus got pulled into a discharge paperwork mess, and I sat there for a minute by myself looking at a half finished cave system before I put it back in the box. I’ve started keeping a running note in the little pocket notebook I carry, same one I use for review notes, just a line here and there when something’s worth remembering. That night I wrote down “Vast, 3-player, didn’t finish, worth trying again” and then under it, smaller, “Priya’s good, ask her Tuesday.”

We never did get the rematch. She picked up more day shifts the following month and our schedules stopped lining up. I still think about that dragon token sitting untouched on the board though. Some nights the game doesn’t need to finish to be the thing you remember about the shift.