by Greyfax

This week no one submitted any questions, so I'm going to discuss what happened to me a little while ago and how that should have gone.

I was at a local board game store, preparing to play a game with a couple of friends. An acquaintance of one of my friends noticed we were getting ready to play, walked up to me, and said, "I would play with you, but you talk too loud." We had not asked him to join us — I prefer three players in most games — and he did not introduce himself or respond to anything any of us had previously said.

This kind of behavior is extremely rude. Do note that I am fairly well-known in the Los Angeles board game community, so he may have recognized me from another event or place.

Also note that I am hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. Normally my voice is not loud, but the background noise input from the hearing aids (apparently) makes my brain think I need to speak louder. (I'm guessing here as I didn't know about this behavior until this incident.) So there's literally nothing I can do about this except try to keep my voice down. However, my friends said they had no issue with the volume of my voice, and we went on to play the game we'd planned.

There's never any call to make sure people know you won't play with them without any prompting — ever.

And if you are prompted, that is, if someone asks you to play a game and you don't want to play with them, an appropriate answer is, "I appreciate the invitation, but I don't feel as if we'd be a good fit." You don't need to explain specifically why. If they insist on knowing, simply say it's not a comfortable situation for you. You do not need to justify why you don't want to play with someone.

If you want to tell them why, that's up to you, but get ready for an argument or hurt feelings. In my opinion, it's best to keep your statement simple and move on.

Hopefully someone will send me a question for the next column!

Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd)

P.S. If there's a situation in your board game group or at a meetup that you would like advice on, please send me a Geekmail with "Ms. Meeple" in the title.