Why I Won't Rate a Game I Haven't Finished

There’s a specific kind of comment I see all the time on games I like, someone rating a heavy campaign box a nine out of ten based on a demo they played at a convention, or a book five stars off the strength of the first chapter and the author’s reputation. I understand the impulse. Some things announce themselves early, you can feel the quality in the first hour. But I’ve made a rule for myself, and I’m stubborn enough about it that I’ve turned down a couple requests to write up something I hadn’t actually finished, that I don’t publish a number unless I’ve sat with the whole thing.

Part of this is just professional habit bleeding into a hobby. When I sign off on a repair, the machine either runs right or it doesn’t, and I don’t get to call a job done because the first hour of diagnostics looked promising. Half a fix isn’t a fix, it’s a liability with better paperwork. I think a review works the same way, or should. A game can have a genuinely great first session and then completely fall apart once the systems interact more than the tutorial let on, and a book can hook you hard in chapter one and then lose the thread entirely by the midpoint. Judging early is judging blind, even when the early impression turns out to be right.

The honest complication is that this rule costs me things. There are three games on my shelf right now that I have real, strong opinions about and zero completed plays of, one because a campaign got interrupted by a work stretch that ran long, one because the group I was playing with fell apart before we finished, one that I just haven’t found the four hour block it needs. I could write something compelling about any of them right now. I’m not going to, because I don’t actually know how they end, and a review that stops at the interesting part isn’t a review, it’s a preview wearing a rating’s clothes.

I’ll admit there’s a stubbornness to this that goes past pure principle. Somewhere in me is the same instinct that won’t let me leave a job half done at a plant just because the easy part’s finished, the sense that quitting early on a thing is its own kind of dishonesty even when nothing’s technically wrong yet. Why give up on getting the real answer when the hard part is right there waiting. I know that costs me timeliness sometimes, other people get their take out while I’m still four chapters from the end of something. I’ve made my peace with being a little late to every conversation if it means I only ever say what I actually believe once I know the whole shape of the thing I’m talking about.