Enlarge (credit: 2016 Wizards of the Coast / Tyler Jacobson)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

I had a magic turtle and mystical hawk in my hands when I saw a woman in a white crop top walking by through the window. I was in The Uncommons, a game store café in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, playing at a pre-release event for the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering’s newest expansion set, Kaladesh. It was 2 a.m. Saturday morning, and the café was full of people making their first plays with cards inspired by a fictional land whose cities run on “aether,” the preferred electricity-with-benefits of sorcery engineers.

The woman looked in at us at cramped tables set along an entire wall’s worth of board games. Was she sneering? Her body language might have had nothing to do with us. Shoulders sagging, arms crossed, she was probably heading home, let down by another expensive night at one of New York City’s bars for cool kids.