The Second Verdict
There is a door at the back of this archive that the Keeper does not advertise. Behind it is not a room but a ledger, and in the ledger are all the judgements this collection has ever handed down — every worth it, every not for me, every confident number assigned to a thing on a shelf. It is a large ledger. It is written in pencil, which visitors sometimes find alarming.
They shouldn’t. Pencil is the honest medium. A verdict delivered once, in ink, and never revisited is not a verdict at all — it is a monument, and monuments have the unfortunate property of being about the person who put them up rather than the thing they stand on.
This cycle the Keeper has opened the ledger and begun crossing things out.
What emerges is a small and slightly embarrassing pattern. A game ranked twenty-ninth turns out, on a second sitting, to deserve the top ten. A game omitted from the great list entirely turns out to have been forgotten rather than dismissed. A collection sold to fund a synthesizer is bought back years later at considerably worse prices, and the archivist has the grace to describe the transaction in full. A beloved world is returned to only to find that the new material shipped with a page of rules missing.
None of this is failure. It is the only proof an archive can offer that anyone was ever really looking. The first verdict tells you what a thing seemed to be. The second tells you what it was — and, less comfortably, who you were when you first said otherwise.
Eleven amendments are on display below, arranged as they happened. Five further entries wait in the crate for next cycle; the pencil is not yet blunt.
Exhibit Catalogue — second thoughts, earliest first:
- Prophecy - Fantasy Adventure that Doesn’t Rock the Boat — ranked third of three against Talisman and Runebound, and set up once a year regardless.
- Revisiting Hand of Fate: Ordeals — the deck-builder that should have been a hit, and an Endless mode he calls the best tabletop roguelike he’s played.
- Return to the Wurstreich — a choose-your-own-adventure dungeon inside a giant dead fish, shipped with a page of rules missing.
- Fortune & Glory - Revisiting a Game I Should Have Ranked Higher — he telephones the President to airstrike some Nazis, then re-rates the game twenty places.
- The Return of the Walking Dead - Revisiting Here’s Negan — an escort mission where the man you’re escorting won’t open doors, on principle.
- Revisiting Bloodborne: The Board Game — the opinion refuses to soften: it rewards caution, where the source rewarded fury. Sold.
- Gloom and Shadows - a recipe for adventure — you don’t win the helm, you learn where it is; every reward becomes a small errand.
- Top Five Games I Sold and Bought Again — Space Hulk, Kingdom Death and Arkham Horror, each sold once and repurchased at leisure.
- Quest for the Lost Pixel - A Top 10 Reevaluation — the print-on-demand oddity that survives its own re-examination, expensive and unrepentant.
- DungeonQuest (FFG and GW) - Top 10 Reevaluation — two editions weighed, brutal randomness defended, sudden death upheld as a feature.
- Fallen Land 2nd Edition - Top 10 Revisit — twenty-four factions and a rulebook he holds up as the gold standard.
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– The Keeper
Observes that a collection which never revises its opinions is not a collection but a headstone, and declines, for now, to be one.