Dana, Ted, and two of Dana’s coworkers came over on a Saturday with what I still think was a reasonable plan, start at noon, budget six hours, be done for dinner. We were not done for dinner. We were not done at 9, we were not done at midnight, and around 1 A.M. someone, I honestly don’t remember who anymore, said the sentence that ends every overambitious game night, that we should probably just call it and finish some other time. Nobody has finished it some other time. That was four months ago.

What actually ate the hours wasn’t any single dramatic moment, it was the accumulation of small ones, a political phase that took twenty minutes longer than any of us expected because two people were negotiating an alliance the rest of us couldn’t see the shape of yet, a combat that needed three separate rulebook checks because none of us had played in over a year and the iconography had gone fuzzy in everyone’s memory at once. I was the one doing most of the rules lookups, which tracks, given what I do for a living, I’m apparently the person in most rooms who’s fastest at finding the exact clause that answers a question. Dana started calling me “the record” partway through the night, not entirely kindly.

One of Dana’s coworkers, who I’d only met twice before that Saturday, spent most of hour four building what he kept calling a coalition against whoever was winning, which sounds simple until you realize nobody at the table, including him, could agree on who that actually was at any given point. We stopped twice just to argue about who was ahead, no clean answer either time, and I remember thinking that was probably the moment the six hour budget quietly became fiction, somewhere around when we were more invested in settling an argument about the score than in actually playing toward an ending. Ted ordered a second round of food around 9 that nobody had planned for, which in hindsight was the real signal none of us wanted to admit yet.

The part that’s stuck with me isn’t the length, honestly, it’s Dana’s face at 1 A.M. when we agreed to stop, this specific mix of relief and genuine disappointment, like a piece of her wanted to keep going even as the rest of her was exhausted. I recognized that look because I’ve made it myself plenty of times. It’s the reason I keep coming back to a game that costs me an entire day every time I play it, the sense partway through that you’re inside something too big and too alive to just abandon, even at one in the morning with work in six hours.

We left the board set up on my dining table for two full days afterward, ships and command tokens frozen exactly where the game stood, on the theory that we’d reconvene that Tuesday and just pick it back up. Tuesday came and went. Eventually I had to clear the table for an actual dinner and I photographed the whole layout first, every system, every fleet, like I was preserving evidence of something rather than just packing away a board game. We still haven’t scheduled the rematch. I think we’re all a little afraid of how good it was going to be.