A friend/coworker of mine and his wife hosted a weekly boardgame night that I attended. Most of the other guests were kinda flaky, and this one particular day, I was the only one who showed up. So it was just me, my friend, and his wife.
Someone suggested Dixit, which I had never played before, but it sounded fun and I was down to play. So we broke it out, shuffled, and started the game.
Now, if you don’t know how Dixit works, it’s basically a deck of cards with pictures on them. One of a toy abacus. Another of a child pointing a toy sword at a dragon. Another of a winding staircase with a snail at the bottom. Etc.
In one version of the game similar to Apples to Apples or Scategories, everyone gets a hand of cards which they keep hidden. The dealer announces a clue and everyone (including the dealer) contributes a card from their hands face-down to the center of the table and the dealer shuffles them together and reveals them all at once without revealing whose card is whose. Then players vote which one they think matches the clue. You get points as a player if others vote for your card or if you vote for the one the dealer picked. As a dealer, you get points if close to 50% of the players vote for yours.
I was the dealer this round. One of the cards in my hand was of a ship’s anchor. That’s when it came to me.
See, the friend/coworker and I both worked in web software development. His wife didn’t. And I came up with the perfect play. I gave the clue “hyperlink.” Hyperlinks on web pages are created using the HTML <a> tag. The “a” stands for “anchor.” And any web developer would know that.
When the vote came in, I got one vote for my card from my friend and his wife failed to select the correct card and so didn’t get any points. It was a slam dunk move. But I felt a little bad for excluding my friend’s wife from an inside-knowledge thing.
The next round, my friend was the dealer and he picked a rule/card that was an inside-knowledge thing between the two of them. (A line from a poem they both knew well, the next line of which related to the picture of the card.) So I was glad of that.
Any good play in a deception game - esspecially an open-ended one - feels so bad.
In particular, the example that comes to mind is when you create an alliance with a friend in TTT with you as a traitor and them an innocent: manipulating them into killing a bunch of their friendly innocents with you, before you shoot them in the back of the head to win the game.
I don’t know what TTT is, but that reminds me of this story that I just posted in response to another comment.
Yeah, that sounds very similar in strategy. TTT is a deception game built on top of the fps video game, Counter Strike - its a pretty typical deception game, one team of innocents with a revealed detective role, and a few hidden traitors amongst them. The main difference compared to a lot of deception games is just that everyone will have weapons and can kill others at any time, often in a fraction of a second. Because fights are so short and bloody, everyone is typically extra jumpy and information that would normally be obvious is easily lost, which makes it perfect for exactly that sort of manipulative play.
Only in Scrabble.
I worked out the Monopoly strategy of buying houses aggressively and refusing to upgrade to hotels
In Civ VI, I let my friend conquer a city from me because that put her civ over into having a majority of its cities following my religion, which won me the game
The Monopoly house thing is a bit of a dick move, but I wouldn’t feel bad about the Civ one–that seems legit.
Monopoly is badly designed so that’s a given.
The house thing is like Monopoly 101. Never buy hotels, stop at 4 houses. If you need more houses, you can buy a hotel and have four houses to buy.
It was definitely legit in the sense of it being something completely counterable by my friend had she been looking out for it, and it certanly wasn’t an exploit. It did still feel dirty to make use of information that she hadn’t noticed to get her to defeat herself, particularly since it only worked by me carefully not saying anything about it for as long as it took to do
Religion victories in Civ are poorly telegraphed in general. You can easily look at the minimap and see that someone is conquering everything, and poking at a player’s borders will show you that they’re technologically advanced, but religion and culture victories tend to sneak up on people.
I got called a dick over a poker game where I went all in knowing ð entire table was stacked wið morons who knew ðey were getting played but would match anyways because it was funnier.
I þink ð poor camp councilor was just mad ðat it instantly ended ð game and he had to figure out someþing else to do.
Dude, just use th.
Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of blatant “PAY ATTENTION TO ME I’M QUIRKY” behavior since AIM.
Neva!
I sincerely hope you’re a teenager or autistic
I hope you are since you need some serious mental growing up if all it takes to irk you is someone’s passive insistence on a letter
I am absolutely not going to take advice regarding mental maturity from you.
If we’re going to introduce a different way to write the voiced dental fricative, dh is the obvious sensible choice
At those times I’m fucking glad that /ð/ is typically short-lived. It tends to erase into nothingness, or to get fortified to /d/, or fronted to /v/.
Why use two letter when one do job just as gud?
Locking people’s meeples forever in Carcassone by creating unplayable holes in the map is what does it for me
My family plays heavyweight games, and enjoy strategy (whether it’s a “strategic” game or not). We mostly get along well (though we’ve had to ban a couple games that got too heated too often), but we’re quite competitive and we put a lot of thought into games when we play.
My wife’s family is the polar opposite. They seem to enjoy passing cards or pieces around without much reason or goal (they often play pure-luck games). The first time I sat down to a game of Rummykub with them, I won the first three games in a row, and it wasn’t close. Fortunately I had the sense to pull back a bit, but then it was super boring. Finally I gave myself a new goal–each game, I mentally chose another player at the table and would subtly play to see if I could get them to win. I had about a 3/4 success rate on that, and the whole experience was more enjoyable for everyone.
Which games did you guys ban? Diplomacy? :>
Monopoly and Settlers. Both very cutthroat at family gatherings.
Hm I wouldn’t have guessed since those are generally considered “family games”. I guess the negotiation aspect of those games can get pretty heated if folks get a bit petty and play kingmaker by giving away all their resources to someone to end the game faster when they find out they’re in a losing position :o
Settlers can be played pretty competitively–stuff like building a settlement in a “bad” position just to mess up someone working to build next to that spot, stuff like that.
The friction in Monopoly mainly comes down to our table rules, specifically that you can make any deal verbally you want (though there’s no guarantee the other party will follow through).
My family monopoly games ended up with written contracts signed by both players with things such as “in return for Player B gaining ownership of Park Lane, Player A does not pay rent on purple properties, and in addition 10% of payments made to Player B for non-player A players landing on Park Lane.”
Now we just play Scythe, Ticket to Ride, or the like.
Haha I think there was one time we played Catan where people started trading futures contracts on someone’s wheat production. It went something like “I’ll sell you this contract for Jimbo’s next two wheat production rolls if you don’t build that road over there.” :>
Yeah, we did stuff like that too. Then people started breaking contracts, and things got ugly.
Playing Diplomacy I’m pretty sure violates the Geneva convention.
One time I played exploding kittens and fucked everyone else over so hard that I felt bad and never played again because I was too good at guessing what kinds of cards people had, how and when they’d use them, and remembering who had already used their defuses. The result was that I was really good at setting people up to explode. On top of that, I was told afterward that I had a terrifyingly good poker face; that the moment the game began I turned into an expressionless robot kinda poker face.
Made me feel like an asshole even though I wasn’t meaning to try-hard it.
I used to play a LAN game. Run around exploring a dungeon, find treasures, weapons, etc. and use them to whack on other players. One of the things you could find was a magic feather that let you walk through walls when wielded. Useful but not too powerful since it was expended with use. After about 15 minutes, if nobody had won, the game went into Armageddon mode by teleporting everyone to a small hostile room to cage match until only one survived. So I used the feather then and hopped into the wall. I could still hit and be hit by adjacent players, but was immune from all the environmental hazards that only existed inside the room.
Next game we played had a house rule to not do that anymore.
C&C Red Alert, I played red, friend played blue. I spent loads on tesla coils, which I kept in the rear of my base. He found my base, did not get near enough to see the coils before my guards killed his scout, and returned with an army, expecting the camp to be nearly undefended. His complete army got roasted by the tesla coils.
Next turn, he was red and I was blue. He tried to copy my tactic, but I came from the rear with a small unit and killed two of his power stations, disabling his power grid. No power, no tesla coils…
Sooo my room mate invited me to play Total War Warhammer 2 with him (RTS game based on fantasy warhammer). It was his all time favorite game, and I had played it a bit. Think 2k hours for him, 100ish for me. But I had mostly been playing the Vampire Counts, and he jumped around a lot, mostly playing the Empire as he loved their lore and how they played. Him picking the empire was kind of a dick move because they spawned very close to vampire counts, so odds were he was going to crush me mid game.
But the thing is, he had mostly played against AI, and he had never played AS the vampire counts. If you ever play as the vampire counts in that game, you quickly realize there is only one good strategy, one that the AI never uses. You can get completely free skeleton soldiers. The game normally hard caps you with negatives around 2k soldiers (2-3 full armies). They aren’t great soldiers, but you can do upgrades for them to make them acceptable, and they mostly will function as meat sponges to bog down enemies while your generals do most of the killing. It’s not something I looked up, it’s just super obvious when you play as them that there is no purpose to any other units.
On turn 25 he thought something was wrong when he saw 5 armies attack a neighbor of his. He knew something was terribly wrong when 10 entered his territory at a point in the game when he had 2 1/2. There was shouting, there were accusations, there was mad giggling. As my room mate was thrusted full force into the zombie apocalypse. His soldiers killed thousands of skeletons, early game heavy infantry backed by mortars and arbalesters. The K/D was terrible for me. He had been focusing on building the bones of an unstoppable late gate death ball of heavy infantry and artillery, so his units were strong. But it still needed 30 turns to be invincible. But I kept winning, because his units ran out of bullets and mortar shells before I ran out of skeletons.
Then the fun thing about Vampire counts is, if you win a MASSIVE battle with tens of thousands of deaths… you can instantly recruit skeletons from that grave site! With each battle my army replenished, my generals grew more powerful, and he grew more annoyed.
After another bloody defeat of his final army, killing like 7k skeletons just to see mine raise from the dead, and his capital under siege, he resigned.
Despite his thousands of hours he said it was equally the most fun and most tilting game ever. But I just felt like I was playing lore accurate necromancers :D But when he was like “You must be cheating the game must stop this some how” and I’m just like… nah fam, game busted. I did feel a little bad. Then went back to giggling when he insisted he could win and then all his units ran out of ammo again.
When your own soldiers come back to attack you: “Stop hitting yourself”
I played according to rules but still felt a little bad about the one time I won an 8-player game of Munchkin because the door wasn’t a monster so I got to play one from my hand: a potted plant. They tried so hard to curse me or beef up the monster but I was way passed the level needed to beat it.
Never feel bad for pulling insane shenanigans in munchkin. That’s liberally what it’s for.
Ending a game of Munchkin is almost impossible to do without upsetting the rest of the players. If you felt bad, that’s fair, but what you described is very much in the spirit of the game.
The first time I played Scrabble was with an old university friend and his wife. They both fancied themselves expert Scrabble players. Both bright and talented folks and lovely people. I won the game and the last word I played was DILDO.
I have never again played Scrabble again since I figured I could never top that. Also they never asked me to play with them again either.
Yeah. this was in high school, in my math class, and we were playing a math game.
The way it worked, was that every table was a team, and each team had a “castle” drawn up onto the whiteboard. A random spinner was used to determine a team, who would then solve a problem the teacher assigned. If you successfully solved the problem, you could draw an X on another teams castle. 3 X’s mean that you are out.
My team was out. But, since this was a class, we could still solve problems, and still draw X’s. Our table got selected to solve a problem, and I did successfully. I looked at the board, and realized that only two teams had a single X, every other team had either two or three. In other words, I could choose who won the game, even though I could not win.
So, I started trying to get bids. I tried to get real money, but someone tried to scam me with some “draw the X first” nonsense. But, the other team offered to pay me four of the school’s fake money, and I accepted that and allowed them to win.
I may not have won the game, but I certainly felt victorious that day.
I’ve lost friends playing Risk.
What’s the strat?
I look at it kinda like how business is sometimes conducted on a golf course. With a more drawn out context, the situations reveal hidden facets of a person’s character as pressures and opportunities arise. It is the critical tangent, to be blunt.
Start in Australia, got it
I used to play 1v1 Ticket to Ride matches against my wife using the app.
As background: I’m not a very competitive gamer, but I’m decent at problem solving. When I first learned TtR, I played with fairly … great players. One of my friends was (is?) nationally ranked. They routinely beat the ever-loving crap out of me. I think of the dozens of games we’ve played, I have won maybe 10-20% of the time?
My wife isn’t bad at TtR, but she doesn’t see things the same way in terms of strategy.
We had this one game where I drew a bunch of short routes all over the map, which blocked her early in the game, and a series of lucky route draws lead me to connect them, inadvertently blocking her at least twice, including on the last play, where I was just dumping cars to end the game.
She was always a little upset when I beat her, but this time the discrepancy was so bad and she was so upset. I just stopped playing Ticket to Ride - like, at all.
