I’ve lived in this city long enough to watch neighborhoods tear themselves apart over parking dibs, aldermanic wards, and whether a hot dog can have ketchup on it (it cannot, and I will not be taking questions). But I have never — and I need you to understand the weight of that word — never seen a community fracture as cleanly and as bitterly as the Thursday night board game group at Kevin and Amy Wojciechowski’s apartment on Kedzie.

It started, as these things always do, with Settlers of Catan. Specifically, it started with a wheat embargo. For those unfamiliar with the game — and God help you if you are, because someone at your next dinner party will absolutely explain it to you — Catan is a trading game where players swap resources to build settlements. The key word there is “trading.” It is supposed to be cooperative. It is never cooperative.

According to multiple witnesses, the trouble began when longtime player Greg Dolinski refused to trade wheat to anyone at the table for three consecutive turns. Not because he didn’t have wheat. He had eight wheat. He was sitting on a wheat empire. He simply, in his words, “didn’t feel like it.” When pressed by Amy Wojciechowski, who needed exactly one wheat to build a city and win the game, Dolinski reportedly leaned back in his chair and said, “The market has spoken.”

That was five weeks ago. The group has not played together since.

What followed was a diplomatic crisis that would be impressive if it weren’t so profoundly unnecessary. Texts were exchanged. A shared Google Doc titled “Game Night Ground Rules v2” was created, edited by four people simultaneously, and abandoned after someone — sources differ on who — changed the font to Comic Sans and added a section titled “Greg’s Wheat Crimes.” A group chat that had existed peacefully for two years was muted by half its members and renamed “Game Night (Real)” by the other half.

The schism is now formalized. Kevin and Amy host what they call “Original Game Night” on the first and third Thursdays. Greg, along with three allies who sided with his right to free-market resource hoarding, hosts “Game Night Prime” on the second and fourth Thursdays at his place on Sacramento. Both groups claim to be having more fun than the other. Neither group appears to be having fun.

I went to both. Original Game Night was playing Wingspan — a game about birds that is exactly as exciting as that sounds — and the conversation kept circling back to Greg the way a tongue keeps finding a missing tooth. “We don’t even talk about him,” said Amy, before spending the next twenty minutes talking about him. Game Night Prime, meanwhile, was playing Risk, which feels like a choice so on-the-nose it borders on performance art. Greg was conquering Asia. He looked tired.

Here’s what kills me, and I say this as a man who once didn’t speak to his brother-in-law for eight months over a Bears prediction: these are adults. They have jobs and mortgages and opinions about school board candidates. And they have allowed a board game about fictional sheep and ore to bifurcate their social lives with the precision of a church split. But that’s Chicago for you. We don’t do things halfway. We don’t let grudges die quiet deaths. We name them, we organize around them, and we meet on alternating Thursdays until someone moves to the suburbs or the building gets converted to condos, whichever comes first.

Kevin told me he thinks reconciliation is possible by summer. Amy gave it until 2027. Greg didn’t offer a timeline but noted that he still has a lot of wheat. The market, apparently, has more to say.