Game night

For about a year now I've been going to a board game night with people from work. Thursdays, at a different apartment each week, whoever has the biggest table and the most patient neighbors. There are usually six or seven of us. Someone brings chips, someone brings something they baked to prove a point, and there's a rule that nobody talks about work after the first hour, which we break within the first ten minutes.

We play whatever someone brings. Long games of building railroads across a map of the country. Fast word games where one person gives clues and everyone else shouts. A cooperative game about curing diseases that we have lost, as a group, more often than seems statistically possible. It's the one evening of the week where I'm not responsible for whether anything is good.

Owen started coming in the spring. I've known him a couple of years from work, where he keeps the servers standing up, which is a job nobody notices until something goes wrong and nobody thanks him for when it doesn't. We met arguing in a hallway about something that was neither of our departments, and we've kept that up ever since, in hallways, kitchens and once in a stairwell during a fire drill.

At game night, Owen reads the rules. All of them. He reads the rulebook front to back before anyone may touch a piece, and then he plays by it exactly as written. Not as remembered, not as it's always been played at someone's parents' house, and never as it would be more fun. House rules he treats like a bug report. If a rule is bad, he says, the thing to do is play it as written and find out why it's bad, and only then decide.

This produces arguments. Two weeks ago we spent forty minutes on whether "adjacent" included diagonally adjacent. He was right. It didn't. It was in the glossary, on the last page, in small print, and nobody spoke to him for a full round. Once, when a rulebook really was ambiguous, he wrote to the publisher in Germany. They wrote back. He printed their answer and keeps it folded in the box.

I'm the opposite. I'm a writer, and I believe in the spirit of a thing. I think the rules are the floor, and the game is what people do on top of them. Owen thinks the rules are the game, and everything else is people cheating politely. We've had that argument at least once a week since April. Neither of us has budged an inch, and I've started to suspect we both enjoy it more than the games.

He is also very good at the word game where you give one-word clues, in a way that's slightly alarming. His clues are perfectly logical and nobody else gets them. He wins anyway.

Are you a letter-of-the-rules person or a spirit-of-the-rules person? Be honest.