I don’t remember deciding to become the person who settles rules disputes at game night, it just accumulated, one disagreement at a time, until Dana started literally calling me “the record” during our Twilight Imperium disaster and it stuck as a running joke that isn’t entirely a joke. The pattern is always the same, someone half remembers a rule, someone else half remembers it slightly differently, both are confident, and instead of everyone pulling out their phones I’ve already got the rulebook open to roughly the right section before the argument really gets going.

I think this comes directly from what I do all day, not the reading exactly but the specific skill underneath it, the ability to go back to a source and find precisely where a disputed thing was actually said, instead of trusting anyone’s memory of it including my own. A deposition transcript exists because two people’s memory of the same conversation can diverge within minutes of the conversation happening, and my whole job is being the neutral record that settles which version is accurate. It turns out that’s directly transferable to whether a card’s ability triggers before or after a specific game phase resolves. I didn’t expect my career to have a party trick. It apparently does.

The clearest example I can point to happened during a game of Mage Knight, Dana and Ted arguing for a good five minutes about whether a wound card could be discarded during the same turn it was drawn, both of them citing a rule they were positive they remembered correctly from a game months earlier. I didn’t argue either side. I just found the wound card section in the rulebook, read the actual sentence out loud once, and the argument ended immediately, not because I’d won anything but because there was suddenly nothing left to disagree about. Dana laughed and said she felt a little robbed of the fun of arguing about it. I understood that completely and still didn’t feel bad about ending it.

Ted says he likes having me at the table for exactly this reason, that arguments used to derail whole sessions before I started playing with the group regularly, and now they resolve in under a minute because somebody just checks. I’ll admit there’s a version of this that could tip into being annoying, the person who won’t let a house rule breathe because the actual rule says something slightly different, and I try to watch for that in myself, sometimes a table wants to just decide something together rather than have the “correct” answer imposed on them. I’ve started asking, before I open the rulebook, whether people actually want the answer or just wanted to argue about it for a minute, since those turn out to be different requests more often than I expected.

Mostly, though, I’ve made peace with the role. Somebody has to be the record. I already know how to be one, and there’s a specific satisfaction in it I didn’t anticipate when this all started, the same small click of rightness I get at work when a garbled exchange in a transcript finally resolves into something clean and certain on the page.