"It wasn't? That's terrible. Did the government where you came from catch whoever did it to you?"

Oh great this again. "That would be a no. I don't like telling this story."

"Okay. ...If they somehow find this world, randomly assaulting people we care about is the kind of thing that could turn the whole clan against them. Just so you know."

"Oh, she's dead. And I'm still probably not going to get any closer than 'friendly', not that I don't like you all, but it's the way I am."

"Then stay friendly. Want me to tell her not to bother asking?"

"Mm." He'd better face this with something approaching seriousness after all. "Probably, yeah. But first, you were going to say something a minute ago, 'well, you don't have to-'?"

"You don't have to join the family. You don't have to be one of us to be a friend of the family and you don't have to be a friend to do business with Lanisal. And you clearly don't need a woman. Or a business partner. Or friends. But whichever of those you want you can have."

"...Yeah. Friends perhaps, and business partners certainly, but not family. I wouldn't be very healthy for one of those, and one wouldn't be particularly healthy for me either."

"Oh." Seli, who has never not had a family, is horrified. "Anyway can we play again?"

"Sure." It's bound to be more fun than talking about this.

This time he goes for a highly aggressive strategy, trying to trap Seli's king and willing to lose pieces doing it.

Seli plays noticeably better this time. He tries to control the center. He defends his pieces better. By sheer point value of pieces lost he's not that far behind this time.

But he doesn't anticipate the trap. It's not a long game. He's a gracious loser this time too.

"I do like chess. The best two-player board games have fairly simple rules but scads of strategy you can learn and master. Maybe I should publicize it, see if it gets popular. Maybe I should teach you Go. Scrabble doesn't work if you don't know English... Mahjong, or the Game of Ur? And I should learn some more local games, as well."

"We have some that don't need lots of players, I can teach you some of those if you want?"

"I tend to like five-or-less-people sorts of games, so I think that'd be fun, yeah."

"Hm. Do you think you'd like a card game, or only board games?"

"Either's fine. Is there a standard deck of cards? There's one back home, but probably not the same one."

"I'll show you." He gets one out of the nearest cabinet, unboxes it, spreads the cards face-up between them where the chessboard was. "So there are forty nine cards but this one's a wildcard, it's not used in every game. There are four suits: scrolls, bottles, people, plants. And each suit has one card for every magic. We start every game by shuffling the deck so the cards are in a random order. There are a couple I think you might like..." He describes both of them briefly and lets Nik pick which one to try.

"Ours has thirteen cards of four suits, and two wild cards. Probably close enough to the same."

He wants to try both, honestly.

He's good at games just by how his mind runs so quickly, especially if they're amenable to card-counting. He tries to distract himself enough not to track which cards are which by the little marks and dings on their backs or literally watching the deck being shuffled, though.

The card backs are exactly identical. If there are any marks or dings they're hidden under an illusion.

The game Seli suggests they try first isn't all that competitive. There's a threshold you have to score above to be able to win, even if you score better than the other player. There's a second threshold that guarantees victory, if both players pass that one it's counted as a win for both. The gameplay is mostly based around building up sets of thematically similar cards.

And it's a lot easier to close his eyes as the shuffling goes and lose track of where exactly that heat of bottles went and if it's still next to the death of plants.

"Very cooperative, eh? Well, I can cooperate. Are we supposed to talk to each other or nah?"

"House rules say sure but lying's allowed. Some people do it differently."

"So do I actually trust you to not just take the win. Heh."

Nick is good at detecting lying. He can watch all the physical reactions to tension, assuming they're recognizable in a caralendar. He'll play nice and give Seli lots of help until and unless he detects lying.

Seli is very good at this and aims for the second threshold. The way score multipliers work that brings Nik's score up a little extra whenever he adds to Seli's sets.

He explains why he makes the moves he does. He's usually cagey about what he has in his hand, but sometimes he mentions other moves he wouldn't make even if he had the relevant cards and why he wouldn't make them.

Nik forms a pretty decent guess about what Seli has, and also aims for the second threshold. "This is something like an allegory. Working together creates greater things than fighting ever could, yadda yadda, and so on."

Seli laughs. "Yeah, and something about harmony. I guess that's what clans are for. And the empire too, I guess."

He doesn't play to keep Nik down, but beyond explaining his strategy he doesn't help much. It's not easy even without competition, Nik would have to be pretty far ahead of the curve to stand more than a tiny chance of winning his first game.