My (short) life as a gamer

For years I've been promising Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson that I would play an afternoon game with them, if only once.  And for years I've held out.  Since I used to play chess, Scrabble, and other games I cannot claim an intrinsic dislike of gaming.  Yesterday I tried to play Kremlin with them but I had to give up after thirty minutes.  My head hurt and I was not motivated to impose interesting structure on the game as a life activity.  I'm still looking for a simple model of my failure.  One hypothesis is that anyone who deals with university administration, as I sometimes do, will have no marginal taste for playing Kremlin.