The Hotel Lobby Rule

Somewhere after Reyes and I taught each other a card game in that Denver layover, I picked up a habit I never officially decided on, I just noticed one day I’d been doing it for a while. If I check into a hotel and there’s a lobby with an actual table in it, not just chairs facing a television, and someone else is sitting there alone looking like their evening has more empty hours in it than plans, I’ll ask if they want to learn something. Maybe one time in four somebody says yes. That’s a good rate, honestly, better than I expected the first time I tried it.

The game has to be small enough to teach in under ten minutes or it doesn’t work, which is its own kind of filter, it’s taught me more about which games actually explain themselves cleanly than any review ever has. You learn fast which rulesets survive being explained by a tired guy at a hotel table to someone who just wants something to do besides scroll their phone before bed. The ones that need a rulebook and a YouTube video don’t make the cut. The ones where I can say four sentences and deal cards, those are the ones that end up staying in the travel case permanently.

Most of the people I’ve played with this way I’ll never see again, which I used to think would bother me more than it does. There was a hotel maintenance guy in Amarillo who beat me twice in a row and would not let me forget it over breakfast the next morning. There was a woman traveling for a work conference in Joplin who taught me she’d learned the exact same game from her dad decades ago and hadn’t played it since he passed, which turned an ordinary Tuesday into something I still think about. None of these people know my last name. I don’t know most of theirs. It doesn’t seem to matter for what the hour needed to be.

I’ve had exactly one hotel manager politely ask us to keep it down, which felt like a fair trade for however many good hours the rule’s given me over the years. I don’t think this makes me some kind of road warrior evangelist for board games, I’m really just someone who got tired of eating a vending machine dinner alone in a room with the television on for background noise, and found out a deck of cards fixes that a lot better than the television does. The rule stays simple on purpose. Table, stranger, an hour with nothing else claiming it. That’s the whole bar.