People who don’t live in this part of North Carolina don’t quite believe me when I describe the fog here, the way it pools in the valleys around Asheville some evenings like the whole town got tucked under a blanket, thick enough that headlights on the road below the ridge look like something underwater. It’s beautiful and it is also, practically speaking, the reason I’ve stopped scheduling anything ambitious for a Friday between about October and March.
Twilight Imperium is the obvious casualty here. That’s a five or six hour commitment on a good night, and if half your Friday crew has to drive down out of the hills through fog thick enough to slow everyone to twenty miles an hour, you’re not starting a six hour game at seven, you’re starting it at eight thirty if you’re lucky, and somebody’s leaving at one in the morning down the same roads in worse conditions than they arrived in. I learned this the hard way maybe two winters back, when what should’ve been an epic session turned into everyone quietly checking their phones for road conditions by round four instead of paying attention to the game.
So now I’ve got an actual seasonal rotation, which sounds more organized than it is, it’s really just me looking at the forecast Thursday night and deciding whether this is a Faraway kind of Friday or a real one. Fog nights get the small box games, the twenty minute closers, things Pri or Dev can bail on early without it wrecking anyone’s evening if the drive home gets sketchy. Clear nights, especially those first sharp cold ones in November before the fog really settles in for the winter, those are when I pull out the big stuff, the games that need six committed people and no early exits.
I used to think this was me being overly cautious, the same instinct that makes me check tolerances on drawer boxes all day bleeding into my social calendar in a slightly neurotic way. Dev pointed out, not unkindly, that I’ve basically built a whole risk assessment system around a hobby that’s supposed to be relaxing. He’s not wrong. But I’d rather have a system than the alternative, which is the memory of watching three people I care about creep down a mountain road in weather none of us should’ve been driving in, because I wanted to finish one more strategy phase. The fog doesn’t care what game we picked. It’s just there most winter evenings, patient, and I’ve decided the smart move is planning around it rather than pretending it isn’t going to show up eventually, usually right around the third round.