Teaching Dana Sky Team on a Tuesday That Went Sideways

I’d been trying to get Dana to play something with me for the better part of two years before Sky Team actually worked, and I want to be honest about the first attempt because it did not go well. We crashed the plane. Tutorial scenario, easiest landing in the box, and we crashed it, because I explained the communication rule wrong and she thought she was supposed to tell me her actual dice numbers, and I kept correcting her mid-round in a tone that, in retrospect, was not the tone you use with someone you’re trying to convince a hobby is fun.

She works nights at a clinic a few towns over, which means our schedules line up in this narrow window on Tuesday evenings before she has to leave, and most games don’t fit into that window even if she wanted to learn one, which for a long time she didn’t particularly. I’d tried teaching her a couple heavier things over the years and watched her eyes go somewhere else around minute fifteen of the rules explanation, which is a completely fair reaction, I’d probably do the same thing if she tried to walk me through something from her job.

Sky Team is different because the rules fit on one small reference card and the tension comes from what you can’t say to each other, not from remembering forty exceptions. Second attempt, a week after the crash, went better, and considering it was really our first honest attempt at the thing, it had a good run, we actually landed the plane, and I remember the exact moment she got it, the round where she said something vague on purpose instead of just blurting her dice value, because she’d finally understood that the vagueness was the whole point, not a rule she was fumbling. That was the moment this stopped being me trying to get her into my hobby and started being something we were actually doing together.

We’ve kept it up since, most weeks, twenty minutes before she has to head out the door. It’s on the kitchen table now instead of the card table in the spare room, which has become its own kind of signal in the house, if it’s set up on the kitchen table it means tonight’s a Sky Team night and not one of my longer things. She still brings up the crash. Every single time we have a rough landing she says something like well, at least we didn’t hit the tutorial scenario problem again, and I let her have it, because she’s not wrong that the first landing we ever attempted together went about as badly as a landing can go. It’s a good story now. It wasn’t a good night at the time. Both things are true and I think that’s mostly how it goes with getting someone into something you love, the first attempt is rarely the one that sells it, it’s usually the second or third try after you’ve both figured out what actually went wrong.