I’d read about Cyclades for months before I owned it, the miniatures, the auction mechanic for the gods, and I talked it up to my regular group so much that by the time it actually arrived and hit the table, expectations were somewhere near the ceiling. I’m the one in my group who does the research before a purchase, reads the reviews, watches a rules explanation video, and usually that pre-work pays off in a genuinely good recommendation. This time it didn’t, not the way I’d promised it would.

The teaching went fine. The components landed exactly the way I said they would, everyone picked their creature up off the table at least once just to look at it, which is always a good sign early in a session. It was the endgame that broke it, the exact thing I’d read about in other people’s reviews and dismissed as probably an exaggeration, whoever’s ahead gets ganged up on by the whole table almost automatically, and my friend who’d built the strongest position for three-quarters of the game watched it get dismantled in the last twenty minutes by everyone else deciding, correctly by the rules but brutally in the moment, that stopping her was more valuable than advancing themselves.

She was a good sport about it. She’s played enough of these games with me to know the risk going in. But I watched her enthusiasm for it drop in real time, from genuinely engaged to just finishing out the game because we’d started it, and I felt responsible in a way that surprised me, because I’d been the one insisting this was going to be a hit.

I’ve since learned to caveat my recommendations more honestly, to say the good parts loudly and the structural problems just as loudly instead of burying them in an aside, which is exactly the kind of balanced pitch I give a patron asking about a book and somehow forget to give my own friends about a game I’m personally excited about. Enthusiasm makes you a worse reviewer of your own taste, it turns out, not a better one.

Cyclades still gets played at my table sometimes. I’m just honest about what it does at the end now, before anyone sits down, not after.