At least Sam Darnold didn’t end up playing board games—at least, not that we’re aware of. Over the next couple of weeks, there will be extensive coverage of Darnold’s roller-coaster journey, so perhaps some surprising stories will emerge from his time in New York, Charlotte, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Seattle.

John Travolta, on the other hand, did have to play board games. By the early 1990s, Travolta’s movie career was in dire straits. Once a young and successful Hollywood star, his reputation had soured to the extent that people thought Quentin Tarantino was joking about casting him as Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction.”

Tarantino needed to be sure that Travolta was worth the risk, so he invited the actor to his home for dinner. However, the meal was merely the beginning of the evening.

“Then,” Travolta recalled in 2004, “he wanted to play games.”