The Five Stars I Took Back

I gave a game five stars once after a single, genuinely incredible night, the kind of session where every decision felt sharp and every swing of momentum landed exactly right, Dale and Priya and I stayed at the table an hour past when we meant to stop because nobody wanted the game to end. I wrote the review the next morning still riding that feeling, and I stand by every sentence of it as an honest account of that specific night. What I got wrong was treating one incredible night as a verdict on the game itself.

Six plays later, spread across a few months, the shine was mostly gone. The thing that made that first night electric, a genuinely dramatic swing where a losing position turned around in the game’s final round, turned out to happen because of a rules interaction we’d misplayed, not because the design was actually that dynamic. Once we started running it correctly, the game settled into something more ordinary, competent, well made, but not the lightning-in-a-bottle experience the five-star review described.

This is exactly the kind of mistake my day job trains me to catch in other people’s work and apparently not always in my own. I tell first-time buyers constantly not to fall in love with a house on one good showing, walk through it twice, in different light, on a different day of the week, because a house shows differently on a sunny Saturday afternoon than it does on a gray Tuesday morning when the furnace kicks on funny. I gave a board game the sunny-Saturday treatment and called it the whole truth.

I went back and changed the rating to a 3, added a note explaining why, and left the original review’s description of that first night intact rather than rewriting it, because the feeling I described was real, it just wasn’t the same thing as an accurate long-term rating. The spreadsheet is what actually caught this, seeing five separate play dates with increasingly lukewarm one-line verdicts sitting under a five-star rating I’d never revisited was the kind of discrepancy that’s obvious on a page even when it’s easy to miss in memory.

I don’t think the answer is refusing to rate anything until you’ve played it a dozen times, that’s its own kind of paralysis. But I’ve started treating a rating given after one electric session as provisional now, worth revisiting once the memory of that specific night stops doing the rating’s work for it. Dale still brings up that first night sometimes like it’s a shared memory worth protecting. It is. It just isn’t a review.