The Guy Who Wanted to Send Me Low Water

Got an email back in March from a two person outfit out of Lafayette, said he’d read pretty much everything I’d put up on the site going back close to two years and wanted to send me a copy of his game before it hit Kickstarter. Trick taking game, shrimping boats and levee season, called Low Water. He’d found the contact form off the about page, the one that just dumps into my regular inbox, and wrote three paragraphs that were more sincere than most emails I get from people I actually know.

The offer was straightforward. Free copy, obviously, I love free stuff same as anybody, and he said if I wanted he’d credit me in the campaign and send the second printing too once that existed. All he wanted back was a review up before the launch, timed to it, something to point people at besides his own pitch video.

I sat on it two days before I answered, which for me is a long time, most stuff gets handled the night it lands or not at all. Wasn’t that I was weighing it, though. Two days was just two closes in a row and me not opening my inbox between last call and passing out.

Wrote back standing at the kitchen counter at home, same place everything on this site gets typed, phone propped against the coffee maker. Told him basically what a bank tells you on a loan you didn’t get, turned down, just coming from me instead of them, genuinely flattered, but I don’t take review copies, publishers or game companies, doesn’t matter if it’s a two person shop or a warehouse with a logistics department. He took it fine, said he understood, asked if he could still send the game with no review attached. I turned that down too. Not because I thought he was working an angle. Because once a box like that’s sitting in the house I start writing around it whether I mean to or not, and I’d rather not find out if that’s true about me.

Told the guys about it at Percy’s, the after-shift bar two blocks from work, and Walt took eleven minutes deciding whether I’d made the right call, which tells you everything about how that man plays a game.

Here’s the thing though, laid out plain. It would’ve gotten me a free copy of a game that sounded like something Renard would actually go for on a slow night, trick taking games move fast and he’s got no patience for the long ones. Maybe forty five bucks I didn’t have to spend. Most times that’s exactly the deal, you take the free stuff and go home, no story to it. Nobody was flying me anywhere, nobody was putting my name on a box.

So it wasn’t some hard call I get to dress up into a whole thing about integrity. It was closer to reflex, same reflex that has me telling a rep at the back door no when he’s trying to leave samples nobody ordered. It would’ve been a freebie, sure, but I paid for it eventually, bought Low Water myself once it funded in June, full price plus shipping, and it sat on the shelf a month before the table got to it. Wrote it up, gave it a real number, said the middle third dragged, because it did. If I’d taken his copy free I don’t actually think the review comes out any different. I’m not that easy to buy. But I’d have spent the whole write-up wondering if that was true or if I was just telling myself so, and that wondering is the actual cost of taking something free, not the money. Easier to just not find out.