It's not all about draw chance, but keeping track of draw chance and counting cards will get her pretty far. The early game is really dominated by luck, but it takes strategy to consolidate that random opening into a solid position for the mid-game. Games tend to have a series of near-misses where people manage to counter each other's attempts to win until someone manages to swing a sudden victory.

Since the games don't all take the same amount of time, in between games people hang around some of the tables and quietly socialize, or browse the games lining the walls of the shop.

She is focused. She is in the zone. She attempts to research Card Reality meta on her phone. (Iiiiiif there's a machine translation feature, that is.)

There is not. þereminia has a lot of cool technology, but it lags behind Earth in several ways. There is kludgy, occasionally incorrect machine translation between LCTL and SCOL — but those are both constructed languages with simple grammars explicitly designed to be machine parseable in principle. Not only do they not have enough of a Notal corpus to use statistical learning techniques, they haven't even invented good statistical learning techniques for text.

She can get a hacky open-source for-fun project that can translate known vocabulary, getting maybe one word in three, and which horribly mangles the grammar. Anything more sophisticated will have to go through a person.

Well, it's certainly in character for her to not understand this stuff. She vaguely recognizes maybe one word in ten?? Bleh.

"What the heck even is '[reversal]'..." She mutters, squinting at the phone. "Yes, use the [reversal] strategy. The strategy that is about [reversal]. A word I don't understand. Mrrr... I guess I'll just have to independently derive it."

Well, if she doesn't want to socialize with the other players between rounds, nobody here is going to force her. Or find that terribly strange, honestly. Plenty of people enjoy the structured activity of card games without enjoying the social stuff that happens around them.

She plays pretty well for a first stab at a completely unfamiliar game — but not well enough to qualify for the final bracket. Some of the eliminated players go to watch the bracket and (silently) cheer for their friends. The rest break away and start milling around the shop looking at games, or talking about particularly amazing strategies from the games they were in. A few people go next door for sandwiches.

Any conversations that either Weiss looks interested in will abruptly switch to Notal, with the participants looking briefly sheepish.

She's struck with a sudden urge to disappear into the Woods Between. But that'd throw off everyone else's performances, wouldn't it? And she's making people change languages for her. Ahhhh. Bleh. Blarf. Argl.

After resting her head on a tabletop for a couple of minutes and muttering, she retrieves Homestead from "her messenger bag" (really, an illusion to cover pulling it from her Tail of Holding) and finds an empty table to start semi-mopingly setting it up on. It looks very handmade. Carved and painted wooden worker pieces and resource tokens, cast copper 'town upgrade' pieces, linen play area with spots for things actually sewn into it in colored thread, thick cardstock-type plain-backed paper 'cards' with hand-drawn sketch illustrations for the events pile, small painted wooden board character portraits, a leather bound notebook with handwritten rules.

This immediately starts drawing interest. On Earth, a crowd of socially-awkward board game players might be hesitant to approach someone who seemed to be grumpy and absorbed in what they're doing. Here, her indicator isn't red, and so people feel confident coming over to observe.

"Is that a Tirra game?" one of them asks, leaning against the far side of the table and peering at the pieces. How long have you been holding onto a board-game idea before trying to pump its popularity by pretending it's from Tirra? he thinks but doesn't ask, because it wouldn't be polite.

"Not really, I invented it myself. Probably like twenty people on Tirra know about it and half of those are the craftspeople and artists I paid to help."

She pauses.

"Wanna hear about it?"

Oh, that makes sense. And it's a clever sort of lie, because it means that she's neither spoiling people's ability to learn about Tirra, nor exposing herself to contradiction by any of the actual aliens, should they ask about the game. Although you probably don't volunteer for this sort of deception-game unless you can come up with good lies.

"Yes, please," he agrees. "I always like learning about games."

"It's cooperative-competitive! You are building a village, and need to build all the village improvements or everyone loses, but also you want to be the most prosperous with the best score. I think I went a little bit crazy with how many different things your four farmers can do each season. Oh, there are five seasons a year, planting, summer, harvest, autumn, and winter. And twelve years until the end of the game. And four actions per season, so that's two hundred forty actions per player per game total."

The assembled board game enthusiasts contemplate this for a moment.

"So you've got to be economical with your actions," one of them thinks out loud. "But is there also much diplomacy, to manage the cooperative-competitive aspect?"

"There's lots of ways of being more efficient with your actions and helping each other out. The trick is to help yourself more, if you can."

"What are the different pieces?"

"These are mostly the different resources you can have- Except these ones are your people, and you put them on places to signify what work they are doing. Oh, and this one tracks how long a field has been planted-" She taps a little hourglass-counter. "Each of these six family-heads has a special ability, I'm not really sure if they're that balanced. The abilities help you but also help the other players- For example the Earth Sorcerer here-" A muscular man holding one fist to a floating ball of soil "-He can build town improvements with many fewer actions. But which improvement? The one that benefits his chosen playstyle the most for this run, of course. The priestess completely cancels all monster random events, which are the worst ones in the game. The fire-sorceress makes it so everyone doesn't need wood to make tools, just ore..."

This prompts a round of speculative board game analysis, including an argument about whether the fire-sorceress is weak compared to the others, eventually culminating in a request to play a few games to try and see.