Why does everyone call the second player the 'filler' during setup? It's not a filler job

I watched a group at my local meetup in Portland last Tuesday spend 5 minutes arguing over who should distribute the tokens while the actual game balance was getting ignored, so if we stopped treating turn order as a chore and started treating it as part of the strategy meta, wouldn't that make the whole pre-game ritual actually useful for once?

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leo_campbell22d ago

Buddy of mine runs a weekly game night over in Beaverton, and he started flipping the whole thing on its head. He makes the last player in turn order pick which token set they want first, then works backwards. First time he tried it, the guy who always moans about going last suddenly had an opinion about every single token color and distribution method, it took forever but everyone was actually engaged. Turns out people just want to feel like their spot in the order gives them some kind of edge, even if it's just picking the shiny chips. If more groups treated setup like a mini draft instead of a chore, maybe we'd stop having these silly arguments and start playing sooner.