Ian thought his arms were about to fall off by the time Madison finally opened the door. Not that he blamed her or anything; if anyone should feel bad about the armload of games that seemed to be getting heavier by the second, it was him. He should really have grabbed a duffel bag or something, but his original plan only involved bringing along a copy of Munchkin, and that was easy to carry.
It was only at the last minute that he decided to grab Uno, just in case Madison wanted to play something a little bit easier to learn, and then his copy of Zombies, just in case she wanted to play something more involved, and then Red Dragon Inn, just in case she wanted to play something that was sillier, and then his copy of Citadels, just in case she wanted to play something more strategic, and then his chess board, just in case she wanted to play something classic, and then a couple of card games because they fit in his jacket pocket and he wanted to give her a lot of options, and somehow he made it all the way out to the car before it occurred to him that he was now carrying a significant portion of his game cabinet and he should have put it all in something.
Luckily, Madison didn't seem to think he looked like an idiot carrying everything. Or if she did, at least she thought it was funny. She wore an amused half-smile on her face, the same half-smile she had at work when other people were absolutely losing it over the new client's latest bullshit. Like she was just letting all the stress flow around this little bubble of Maddy-ness, and inside the Maddy-bubble she could see the funny side of even the biggest crisis. Ian thought about that smile a lot. It was one of the big reasons he was so excited to find out that she loved tabletop gaming too.
Not that he was thinking this was a date or anything. That would be really rude and pushy and presumptuous and a total jerk move on Ian's part. Madison suggested they have a board game night, and okay, yes, he did get flustered enough to bring along about a quarter of his collection, but he wasn't about to get so flustered that he acted like a creeper. Unless she dropped some hints that she was interested in something more, Ian was going to treat this as strictly, purely, one hundred percent platonic.
Unless she already had, and he'd missed it. Ian was the first to admit that when it came to flirting, he probably wouldn't recognize anything short of a woman taking her clothes off and shouting, "LET'S GO HAVE WILD, PASSIONATE SEX IN A VARIETY OF ROOMS AND POSITIONS!" While holding a neon sign over her head that said, 'I Lust for Your Body'. Even then, he'd probably just turn around to see who she was talking to.
Madison broke into his train of thought. "Come in, come in!" she said, scooping half the games off the top and carrying them in. "Here, let me," she continued, "if I don't at least give you a clear field of vision you'd never make it to the table. Sorry about the mess, I tried to tidy up but I have an SCA event next week and everything's just chaos right now." She gestured with her free hand to the bolts of cloth propped up against almost every available vertical surface. "I always over-commit for these things. Anyhow, drop the games on the table and let's see what you brought."
Ian wound his way past scattered shoes and over to the dinner table. "Oh, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff," he said modestly, trying not to sound boastful despite the fact that he was, after all, talking about his pride and joy. "Um, I grabbed a copy of Grave Robbers From Outer Space, and We Didn't Playtest This at All, and Cthulhu 500, and...um..." He trailed into silence as he noticed a sizeable freestanding cabinet next to the table, one that appeared to have its own copy of almost everything he brought. He looked over at Madison with a new light of respect in his eyes.
She shrugged modestly in response. "Sorry, I probably should have made it clearer that when I said, 'You don't need to bring anything,' I really meant it." She looked at the stack of games on the table, then over at her collection. "Can you imagine if we ever moved in together? Just sorting out the duplicates would probably take a whole day."
Okay, Ian told himself, that had to be a hint. Didn't it? Was that flirting, or did she just need a roommate? She might have heard Ian mention to Steve that his lease was coming due and he wanted to find a better place, and maybe she was just making a joke about it, and acting all weird about an off-hand comment would be totally creepy. So instead he just replied with a joke of his own. "Nah, it'd take no time at all. Neither one of us could give up our personal copies."
Madison snorted. "Point." She went over to the game cabinet and pulled out a board game Ian didn't recognize, not that his pride was vaguely stung by the fact that Madison had games he'd never even heard of or anything. "I was thinking we could try this one for a start? It's a pretty quick play, and it's a good icebreaker. We can just do a round or two, and then see what we're in the mood for."
She set the box on the table, and Ian took a look at it. After just a glance, he no longer felt guilty about not having heard of this one-judging by the production values, 'Brian Shaw Games' was barely a step up from making stuff in their basement. The logo on the side of the plain cardboard box was just a little skull with lightning bolts shooting out from it, with a slogan that said, 'Scrambling words and brains since 2014.' The top of the box had the same skull-and-lightning-bolt picture, only larger, and the words 'Brain Teaser' in large letters written in one of the 'zanier' fonts.
Ian looked at her, a dubious expression on his face. "You sure this one's...um, I mean...?" He tried to find a delicate way to finish that sentence, conscious of the idea that Brian Shaw might be a friend or a family member that Madison helped with the game. "Um, it just looks a little rough, is all."
"Oh, it's more fun than it looks. Here." Madison opened up the box to reveal a folded board, a scattered handful of small poker chips in a variety of colors, and a stack of white note cards bound together with a rubber band. "It's really simple, The board has a bunch of words on it, and the cards have a list of words from the board. I read off the list to you, and you find the words on the list and put chips on each word. Then we switch, and I try to beat your time. I mean, it's a little unfair, because I've played before and you haven't, but as long as you don't mind losing your first round or two..."
Ian tried to let that go. He really did. There was a tiny split second of a fraction of an instant of a pause where he told himself that nobody liked a hyper-competitive jerk, and she probably wasn't intending that to come off as a challenge, and he could totally let it go and not make this all about winning because the fun was in playing the game...but all that ran into a truth as solid as a brick wall. Ian didn't like losing.
On the surface, he just gave Madison a slightly fixed grin and said, "You're on." He sat down at the table and helped her stack up the chips ("Since it's just the two of us, we don't really need to separate the colors," she said, but they did anyway-some gaming habits were just impossible to break) and unfold the board. Ian was a little bit surprised to see that it actually had some nice design work; the words on the board were written in a variety of different fonts and sizes and hues, and they sprawled at angles and twisted around each other in a way that almost felt dizzying.
Madison took off the rubber band and pulled a card from the stack. "Okay if we just use the clock on the wall as a timer? I think my phone has a stopwatch app if you'd rather get precise, but the game didn't come with one. It would have cost too much." The way she said it really made Ian want to ask who Brian Shaw was, but he pushed the thought away. He needed to focus if he was going to do well on this.
"The clock is fine," he said, sliding a stack of the red chips his way. (Ian had been picking red ever since he was four, and by now he barely even noticed himself doing it.) There were eight of them, presumably one for each word. "Ready when you are." He fixed his eyes on the board, waiting for Madison to begin.
"Okay, here we go," Madison replied, glancing up at the clock and then back down to the card. "Your words are: Down, Deeper, Eyes, Heavy, Relaxed, Sleepy, Soothing, Trance. I'll repeat them as you go, so you don't forget. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down..."
Ian picked up the central theme of the card right away, but guessing themes wasn't the goal of the game. Finding words was. He began to scan the board from left to right and from top to bottom, searching for any of the items on Madison's list. It was definitely harder than he thought it would be-the different fonts and sizes and angles conspired to make it seem like there was a pattern to the way the board was organized, and Ian had to concentrate to keep his eyes from following that pattern in random directions. There were also a lot of very similar words, too-he almost put his chip down on 'Relax' and 'Relaxing' before realizing that they weren't quite what he was supposed to be looking for.
"Deeper," Madison intoned as Ian continued to search. "Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper..." At first Ian thought it would distract him, but thankfully she was pitching her voice low and speaking softly so that he could just let her speech fade into the background while he focused on the board. Even so, he almost tripped himself up-he almost put a token on 'Focus' when his eyes passed over the word just as he was thinking it, and he had to listen through a full rotation of Madison's list before he could remember for sure whether he was supposed to be looking for it or not.
