Sam joined our Thursday group a while back through a mutual friend, and she said something in her first session that should probably have made us pick a different game the following week, that she genuinely dislikes negotiation-heavy games, finds the social pressure exhausting, would rather have a game where the board tells her what’s true rather than trusting whatever another player claims. Naturally, the next thing we did was hand her a Harkonnen faction sheet and sit her down for Dune, a game that is basically nothing but negotiation wearing a spice-mining costume.

The first hour was rough, honestly, she kept trying to play it like a normal Euro, optimizing her own position and mostly ignoring the side conversations happening around her, which in Dune is close to unilateral disarmament, the factions that don’t negotiate get ground down by the ones that do. I remember catching her expression around turn four when someone made her an alliance offer with a hidden cost she hadn’t clocked, and thinking we’d made a genuine mistake putting her in this game on week three of knowing the group.

What actually turned it around wasn’t anything we said, it was her own read on the table starting to catch up, by the second session she’d figured out that Harkonnen specifically rewards exactly the kind of guarded, information-asymmetric dealing she’d said she hated, except reframed as leverage instead of small talk, and something about that reframe clicked for her in a way none of our explaining had. She still doesn’t love party games or anything heavy on vibes-based social deduction. But she asks to play Dune now, unprompted, which is not a sentence I expected to be writing about someone who opened with “I hate negotiating.”

I don’t think the lesson here is that everyone secretly loves negotiation if you just force it on them long enough, that’s clearly not true and I’d never push a game on someone who was genuinely miserable in it. But Sam wasn’t miserable, she was frustrated at a specific mismatch between what she expected the interaction to feel like and what it actually was, and once the game showed her a version of negotiating that ran through hard information rather than charm, it turned out to be a thing she was good at and, it turns out, actually likes.

I asked her afterward what specifically had changed, since I was genuinely curious whether we’d just gotten lucky or whether there was something to actually learn from it for the next new person who joins the group with a stated preference we might accidentally run over. Her answer surprised me, she said it was less about Dune itself and more about realizing that “negotiation” in most party games she’d tried before meant reading people, tone, bluffing, social performance, and she’s just never been good at or comfortable with that specific skill. What Dune asks for instead is closer to what she already does at work, tracking who has leverage over what and using that information plainly, which apparently felt like an entirely different activity wearing the same word.

It’s made me think harder about how loosely we use “negotiation game” as a category, as though the skill involved were the same from one design to the next. It clearly isn’t, not for Sam and probably not for a lot of people who’ve written off an entire genre based on one specific version of it. I don’t know if I’ll always catch a mismatch like that in time, but I’m at least asking better questions now before handing someone a stated dealbreaker in a box.