Does Group Hug ever win? I understand why they ask. In a game that ends when one player is left standing, winning can seem like the only metric that seems to matter. If I claim group hug is powerful, surely I need to prove it by being the last one alive?

I'm aware that I play a different game. My vocabulary might be too different, and too "casual" coded for others. Cards with text boxes so long and strange that people have to read them twice. These are my cards. These are the ones I keep. The rest can sound like noise to me; they don't belong in the worlds I want to build.

In many circles, helpfulness is seen as unintelligent. Empathy is read as naivety. If you give something away for free, then surely you must not understand the value of what you have. But I do understand the value. I just measure it differently.

Group hug became my philosophy. Not the naive kind — not "let's all draw cards and hold hands" — but the deliberate, systems-driven kind. The kind where giving resources is a form of regulation.

It was November, and I found myself standing before a starter kit from the Final Fantasy set. A twenty dollar rectangular promise of something I didn't yet understand.