The Punch List I Run on Every Game Now

A punch list, if you’ve never bought a house, is the short brutal document at the end of an inspection where everything that’s actually wrong gets written down in plain language, no hedging, no softening it for the seller’s feelings. Missing GFCI outlet in the bathroom. Roof flashing pulled back two inches at the chimney. Panel not labeled. It’s not a review of the house’s personality, it’s a list of what’s broken, and I’ve been writing them for nine years now.

I didn’t clock that I’d started doing the same thing to board games until Dale called it out at Thursday game night a few months back. We’d just opened something new, I don’t even remember which one now, and before anyone touched a component I was counting pieces against the manifest in the rulebook, out loud, the way I’d check a breaker panel against its own labeling. Dale put his beer down and said, you’re doing the inspector thing again, and he wasn’t wrong.

It’s a genuinely useful habit even outside the job. A missing punch counter or a miscounted card deck three plays into a campaign is its own kind of structural failure, and catching it at setup instead of turn forty saves everyone a worse headache later. I do the same thing with rulebooks now that I do with a code binder at work, flip to the index first, see if there even is one, see if the publisher respected my time enough to make the thing navigable under pressure. A game that makes me hunt for a rule mid-session the way a bad code book makes me hunt for a clearance requirement loses real points from me before the dice ever hit the table.

The flip side, and I think this is the part that actually explains why I got into this hobby the way I did, is that a house or a game that’s been designed well rewards exactly the kind of close attention my job trains into me anyway. A tight rulebook with cross-references that actually work is the equivalent of a well-documented renovation, someone thought about the next person who’d have to use this. I notice it immediately when a designer skipped that step, the same way I notice immediately when a contractor skipped a step, because both jobs run on the same instinct: assume someone’s going to actually rely on what you built, and build it like they will.

Maren thinks it’s a little much, admittedly, watching me count meeples against a manifest before we’ve even read the rules out loud. She’s probably right. I’ve made my peace with being the guy who runs a punch list on a board game before dinner’s even on the table.