by Justin Bell

A few months ago, I joined two friends for a play of The Gallerist, one of my favorite titles from designer Vital Lacerda. (Also, Vital: thanks for the intel on hot spots in Lisbon. The pastéis de Belém were absolutely magnificent!)

A friend was celebrating his birthday weekend, so he was hosting an all-day gaming session where folks like me would show up in waves to play the birthday boy’s favorite titles. It had been maybe a year since I last played The Gallerist, so I watched a teach video to warm my brain up to the rules and reminded myself of some of the things I’ve seen work when I’ve won, and (more often) watched others do to win.

The host, who we’ll call “Schmeven”, had built a schedule for the day that was pretty tight. We’re talking two-hour blocks, with some games that were already going to push on the soft borders of that Google Sheet’s time window. The Gallerist was set for 11:30 AM, the first game on the slate. For this particular day, I was intent on arriving a couple minutes early, to help Schmeven keep the events on schedule.

I rolled up at 11:28 AM and buzzed Schmeven’s apartment. Walked in, sat down, and readied myself for the play. Schmeven, who, like me, ensures that the first game of the day is locked and loaded when guests arrive, had done his part and the game was set up and ready to go.

Then Schmeven got a text. Our third player, who we’ll call “Slim”, was running late. Slim had taken the wrong bus line to Schmeven’s house, so he was going to be delayed for another 20-30 minutes.

Foolishly, I had made other plans with the family to start about a half-hour after the originally scheduled end time of 1:30 PM. That part is on me; two hours for The Gallerist with players I don’t know is potentially a gamble. But, hope springs eternal. My thinking: if Slim moves at the velocity of Schmeven and I, we’ll be fine to wrap up The Gallerist in 90 minutes or so.

Schmeven’s quick turn-taking is well established; Schmeven and I have done a two-player game of The Gallerist in just over an hour, and we’ve done two games of Speakeasy in a single sitting in under three hours. He has earned the Justin Bell Gold Speed of Approval and is always welcome at my table; he, like me, takes snappy turns. Even though Slim was the wildcard on this particular day, he just had to play at roughly the speeds Schmeven and I normally play at, and we would be in great shape.

Well...not exactly.

***

Slim arrived, exchanged pleasantries, apologized for the delay, and sat down at his station near me at the table. Slim is a seasoned strategy gamer who entered our gaming circles with a wealth of street cred. I was excited to see what he would bring to The Gallerist during our play.

After everyone was seated, I turned to Slim. “When’s the last time you played this one?”

“Gosh, maybe six, seven years ago? It’s been a while, so I’m a little rusty…I didn’t have time to do a full rules refresh, but I think I remember how most of this works…the player aid IS really good, so I can always fall back on that.”

My heart sank. My soul—what little soul I had left—sank lower, if that was possible. We were definitely going to have to sorta play and sorta teach this game to Slim while taking our own turns. There was no way we were getting through this one in 90 minutes.

Separately, in my review crew, everyone knows that I have a hard and fast rule when it comes to tabling games: if there is a teach video anywhere on the interwebs in English, players have to watch those videos before they come to game night. It saves SO MUCH TIME, and it ensures everyone has skin in the game when it comes to the investment part of knocking out multiple plays of different games in a single night.

I am more lax about this with other groups, and for this play of The Gallerist, I think there was an unspoken expectation that everyone knew the rules, but we never called that out when setting up the birthday schedule. After this experience with Schmeven’s birthday play of The Gallerist, I’m thinking about changing my tune.

***

As I expected, Slim tested every bit of my patience during our play. I’m told patience is a virtue, but I’m beginning to question that.

I’ve only joined Slim for a couple of game nights, but I have found that Slim is a player who verbally talks out his options before taking a turn. I do this from time to time, especially late in a game with friends where I can talk through one or two options on a turn that might swing the game. But certainly not on every single turn.

Slim’s turns looked a lot like what some friends call “min-maxing”: exploring many, if not every, possible outcome before making a selection most beneficial to the current game state. Again, no problem late in a game, and I am on record as telling other players that on the final turn of any game, you can take as much time as you want…no one wants to see a player lose a game because they made a major blunder on their final action.

But, Slim’s min-maxing happened on almost every turn for the first nine, maybe ten turns.

The Gallerist is an action selection game where players have a choice of four major locations. Each major location—the International Market, the Sales Office, the Media Center, and the Artists Colony—offers two unique actions. When a player moves their pawn to a new location, they pick one of the two actions there, and execute it. On successive turns, the active player must move their pawn to a new location to take a different action.

I never mind when a player is thinking through which of the three locations they want to move to next, nor how they will best execute the action at their chosen location. But a player needs to fully understand what’s possible at each location, and Slim’s rust showed during those moments. Often, that meant Schmeven and I were explaining what actions were possible at each of the three locations available to Slim on that turn, which meant talking through the possible outcomes of SIX different actions.

Every turn.

When I do a full teach of any serious strategy game for new players—this exact scenario happened just two weeks ago, when I got to play Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders with a couple new players—I just turn my brain off completely when it comes to building my own in-game strategy. That’s because I find it difficult to manage both what I want to do, and what others need to understand in order to enjoy their play of the game. Just when you begin to think through your own turn, a question comes in that breaks your concentration.

For a learning game, totally fine. For this play of The Gallerist, I was pretty excited to get into “the art of strategy,” the game’s tagline.

I quickly became the surly, impatient curmudgeon who rushed through his own turns so that we could simply wrap up the game. By turn four, my main focus became trying to mask my anger, in service of Schmeven, the birthday boy who (I hope) was having a great time just getting a game off the shelf that doesn’t see the table nearly as often as it should.

Maybe two-thirds of the way through our play, Slim was in great shape on the rules and finished off a victory, navigating his own turns with ease. And, to Slim’s credit, he acknowledged the help that was provided by his tablemates during the game. Our play took just over two hours, which in some ways was a miracle.

My only regret? Not doing a full teach of The Gallerist for Slim the moment he acknowledged that he hadn’t played the game in years. Teaching The Gallerist to a new player only takes about 20 minutes—the player aid really is great as a teaching tool—and for a seasoned player with even distant plays under their belt, getting a quick re-teach is usually enough.

It’s also fun to see how I change as I get older. I don’t mind losing, and I’m certainly less competitive than I was ten years ago. But, I do mind waiting. (Yeah, it’s your turn!) If patience really is a virtue, then I guess all I can say for now is that I am working on it!!