"Should I let you get back to being appropriately grim about things."

"The appropriate level of grim about things is whichever makes us most productive -"

"Love you, Nelyo. We're going to go sailing or something."

"...we? I still don't know how to sail."

"I am happy to teach you to sail if you'd like but I wasn't actually making claims on how you were gonna spend your time, just Edie and Huan and I. Maitimo'll feel better if we let him do everything useful he can do before he starts inventing pastimes - though we could have a game of Governor, with two demons you could have fantastic information setups -"

Maitimo looks up, at that.

"...I don't even know what Governor is."

"Neither do I."

"Strategy game, Maitimo never tires of it even though he also never loses at it. You play in teams of two, take turns, you play a turn by writing orders to your subordinates. They start out with dubious reliability, one thing you can do with orders is tease out who is loyal and competent. The second player on the opposite team takes the orders, modifies them for the loyalty and reliability considerations, passes them back, and then there are rules for settling what happens if orders come into conflict - win condition is usually taking over the world -"

"Huh. Sounds fun."

"I'm game, pun unintended but endorsed."

"Nelyo -"

"Sure," he says, "reading through twenty million names and figuring out who we need is going to take me awhile. So the standard game of Governor has a built-in premise, which is that the King's floating island-city launches in a month and you want to be appointed its Governor. But people usually customize the premise - it's fun to work with a non-standard magic system, in particular, and anything set in Tirion would be an unfair advantage to those of us who know our way around it -"

"We could set it on Earth, give them the edge."

"How do we pick teams and positions thereon?"

"I'm all for designing a nonstandard magic system."

"Teams should probably each have one person who knows how to play, at least the first game, while you're getting the hang of it. Starting positions what'll be relevant is how many operatives you have and what resources they've got,  a game can be perfectly fair if one person's the President and the other a private citizen if they've got comparable sets of people-who'll-listen-to-them and resources they can actually bring to bear..."

"Hmm. A church and a university, maybe, vying for control of a city-state..."

"Putting one Elf on each team still leaves eight distinct team composition options if I understand correctly."

"Really comes down to do you hate losing because if so you should be on Maitimo's team."

"Eh, it's a game."

"Then if you want to be top-level player - it involves more of the actual intrigue-pulling - you can play with me and Edie can second Maitimo."

"Suits me."

"Alright then."

And they can set and negotiate starting conditions and clarify the rules and start.

Cam likes this game.