My friend had built a better civilisation than mine.
We were on holiday with our families in Carloforte, a small island off the coast of Sardinia. I had brought Innovation, a card game I was certain he would like because he also plays Magic: The Gathering.
I was right. His experience with Magic meant that he understood the mechanics almost immediately. After four or five games, he could already play well. But he was still an inexperienced Innovation player.
Innovation is not an easy game to learn. Every card represents an invention, from prehistoric technologies such as the Wheel to modern ones such as the Internet. Each invention has its own effect, and cards combine into increasingly absurd engines. You have to read them very carefully. Sometimes you have to read them again. Then your opponent plays another card and the thing you thought you understood becomes something else entirely.
It is a game for a very particular kind of person. Unfortunately for everyone around me, I am exactly that kind of person.
In one of those games, he built an almost obnoxiously dominant position. His civilisation gave him access to more of almost every resource, which meant that his cards worked and mine often did not.
I was trapped. I could still take turns, but almost nothing I did mattered.
In Magic, this is called inevitability. It is what control decks aspire to: establish control, answer the remaining threats, and reduce uncertainty until the opponent is technically still playing but no longer has a realistic route to victory.
My friend believed he had reached that point.
I knew he hadn't.
I had played much more Innovation than he had, and I knew that trying to beat his engine within the current age was pointless. So I stopped trying. I accelerated through history instead.
I don't remember the exact cards I used or the final combination that won me the game. I remember racing through several ages until the technologies available to me changed the balance completely. I found a late-game scoring engine, scored enough points, and eventually won.
The board my friend had built was still excellent.
It had simply become irrelevant.
As I remember it, he called the ending bullshit and unfair. He was frustrated. His position had been superior. He had more resources, more control, and an engine I could barely interact with. Surely that work should have entitled him to victory.
I thought the ending was brilliant for exactly the same reason.
He had learned how to control the board. He had not yet learned how temporary a board could be.
Innovation is, at heart, a game about managing chaos. Its ten ages do not merely contain progressively stronger cards. As the game advances, the effects become more transformative, the interactions become harder to contain, and entirely new routes to victory appear. Volatility escalates with history. Whether that instability is a threat or an opportunity depends entirely on where you are standing.
When you are ahead, you want to preserve the current world. It is already producing the outcome you want. Moving too quickly introduces risks you do not need.
When you are behind, stability is fatal.
Your best option may be to abandon the engine you were building and race towards a future neither player can fully control. You deliberately increase the volatility of the game, exchanging an almost certain loss for a chance of immediate disaster or spectacular escape.
Innovation does not rescue you automatically. It gives you access to danger.
That distinction matters. Drawing exactly the card you need is satisfying, but it is still just getting lucky. Choosing to accelerate, accepting the risk, and racing through the ages in search of a card that can save you feels different. If you find one, you created the conditions for your own luck.
The game does not feel sorry for you. It lets you risk everything to save yourself.
What took me longer to understand was that I was doing more than searching for an answer. My instincts came from Magic: identify the threat, draw through the deck, and find the card that deals with it. But by moving through Innovation's ages, I was changing the environment around the threat itself.
I did not build a better version of his engine.
I moved into a world where his engine mattered less.
That feels uncomfortably real.
I have a board of my own. For most of my career, one of the things I was paid for was typing: taking an idea and laying it out as code, line by line. I was fast and productive. It was my board, built over years, and I liked building it.
Ages usually change slowly. AI made this one feel abrupt, and I can point to the moment I noticed. I was exploring a new idea, and instead of writing anything down I started talking to a language model out loud. My concepts were vague and abstract. I was thinking aloud the way you do with a friend. The model found the essence in between the ambiguity and produced something genuinely good, and well written, before I had typed a word.
Holy shit.
I still enjoy the craft. Nobody is taking that away. But the question is not whether I enjoy it. The question is whether anyone will keep paying for it, and I think the answer is no, or at least not at any scale. People still ride horses. Almost nobody commutes on one.
Apple shaped and still controls consumer computing, the iPhone and the MacBook, in much the same way my friend controlled that board. I suspect it will find out the same thing sooner than most people expect. That is an argument for another post.
You can build the best board at the table. You cannot control history.