Sometimes you think you know a game before you've played it. Sometimes all your assumptions were correct, and it works its way into your heart anyway. Tara (Tara's Bad Luck Club) joins us to talk about games that won us over despite being decidedly not our type. Kenan tells us about the trick-taker that helped him make sense of trick-taking. Alba quizzes us on our knowledge on non-existent bands. Then we reveal the exceptions to our rules and all of yours. Topics include tapping into nostalgia, family gaming traditions, My Favorite Things, Ra, For Sale, Power Grid, Rising Sun, pacing in bidding games, grudges that extend into replays, Landmarks, Codenames, limited communication, the entertainment value of miscommunication, putting a map on it, games that depend on shared references, gaming with moms, Magic Maze, real-time games, Bullet, buyer's remorse, QE, Nidavellir, whether set collection is for babies, big teaches, whether word association is for normies, Bohnanza and negotiation, One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Blood on the Clocktower and Shifted and Feed the Kraken and social deduction, Invincible and bag-building and IP's, That's Not a Hat and party games, Spirit Island and Sky Team and Last Bastion and co-op games, whether memory is for babies, whether you should ever play three card monte (spoiler: no), whether life is a game worth playing (spoiler: yes), whether exceptions prove rules (spoiler: sorta), and whether our biases need to be re-examined (spoiler: no).

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