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.
That is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.
Back when I was in middle school, I had made an unbeatable Magic deck. The whole thing was built around just not letting the other player do jack shit. Everything I had other than the land cards would eliminate your creatures, your spells, or both while doing very little actual damage themselves. It would slowly kill you while you could do nothing but stand by and watch as everything you laid down, would be removed on my next turn.
I felt bad about it only after nobody would play against me anymore.
I play an ongoing ladder/tournament for a Scrabble clone (Wordfeud). I’m kinda stuck at a middling level because of certain holes in my game that I refuse to fix because it would be boring (e.g. I could know what your last 7 tiles are but I do not intend to figure it out), but I’m decent. One of the ways I power through the lower tiers was by realizing that you can play defensively, specifically by shoving ‘C’ and ‘V’ in places that fuck up your opponent’s access to high-scoring tiles (because they have no two-letter words to jump off from), or just leaving points on the rack because maximizing each turn would open things up on the board.
New players simply cannot handle this. I’m sure they don’t have much fun, but I win and go back up to the levels where the strategy helps some but you can’t rely on it. Higher level players can bust through by sheer force of pattern recognition and vocabulary, or they can build words that open up so many avenues that they can withstand my getting some points too, or them fuckers DO keep track of which tiles are left (the gall!). I’m trying to remember that I’m good enough that an open board can help me too, but my tendencies are still pretty defensive.
Back when Words With Friends was big, I developed a reputation among my friend groups for being very good. I wasn’t terribly good, but I noticed there was no penalty for misspelling a word. So each turn, I’d try a bunch of high-scoring combinations that seemed like they might be words, and eventually one would work.
It’s sort of inherent to scrabble-like apps, where there’s so many ways you could mess something up. I am not above taking a flyer on things, but I try not to do it any more than I assume my opponents would. Anyway, having played a lot by now, I know most of the common and medium-weird words, so there’s not a lot for me to guess at, and I’m only rarely surprised when something an opponent plays is a word.
Blue black?
Could be worse, could have been playing land destruction
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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve lost friends playing Risk.
What’s the strat?
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.
I’m probably remembering half of this wrong, it was the only time I’ve ever played Settlers of Catan in my life. So I recall you have to be the first person to so many points and I got something like a port which let me convert hay to points. I got that and then quietly traded all my items for hay.
Out of all of us there were only two guys that had played before, I’ve never met either of them before or since. They were getting really serious and competitive with each other. I still remember the look on one guy’s face when I eon the game out of nowhere. I wasn’t being smug or anything but this guy gave me a proper glare. He was a little bitch and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. A couple of people said they were glad I beat him.
That’s totally on them for ignoring you. Sounds like getting knocked down a peg might have been good for that guy.
Related, Settlers is one of the two games that are banned at my family gatherings.
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.
Two things come to mind (apart from just being annoyingly defensive in Scrabble).
In high school, our friend group would play Risk. We had one friend who was the youngest of the type of family that probably played Risk for fun, and probably discussed strategies afterward. He was clearly better than any of us, but he was never better than all of us. So there was an unspoken rule that everybody just ganged up on Brian until he was crushed, then with the tall poppy gone, the rest of us weeds would figure out who would win that night. For some reason he stopped wanting to play. Some people, amiright?
Then, off and on in my 30s, I played indoor soccer. I was awful. I came to the game late in life, and anyway was WAY past my already-low peak of being a useful player in pickup touch football or Ultimate Frisbee. My most useful contribution was showing up to make sure we didn’t forfeit.
However, all the guys playing O30 rec-league indoor soccer had some hole in their game, so if I could figure them out I could make myself useful until I got too tired (at which point they simply ran around me, LOL). Mostly it was just simple stuff like always pushing attacking players to the corner on the idea that they would take a low-percentage shot out of selfishness (or that none of their teammates would make a trailing run), or else I’d press quickly on the idea that they would eventually make bad passes, and they often did. However, one I was pretty proud of. I noticed a pretty good player (for our level) liked to keep an eye on the build-up from his keeper and defenders and trap the ball with his chest to turn and dribble. I saw one of his teammates launch one of these long balls, and I saw him start backpedaling towards me so I just… stopped.
I was not moving at all, and this skinny little fucker had a pretty good head of steam for somebody moving backwards. He plowed right into me and crumpled before bouncing up frothing mad. He only got angrier when the ref called him for the foul. I smiled a fat little smile, and then got off the field cuz I was already getting tired.
I had a few others where I got away with shit because the refs could see I was awful as easily as anyone else, so they assumed I couldn’t have intentionally directed the ball with the hand I was holding against my torso, or that I must not have been able to stop before running into some dude, but the backwards jackass (he really was unpleasant) play was uniquely satisfying.
When people make me play Monopoly, I always take the housing shortage strategy for the guaranteed fast win. People hate me, but rules are rules, and I hate that game.
I was playing civ 5 with a few IRL friends over internet multiplayer. Victory types : religion scientific or political I had the largest economy by far but I was behind in tech. My military was decent. My religion was the third or fourth largest.
I had made a personal agreement through DM with one of the other human players and asked them if I could put a spy in their Capital and steal the techs they had acquired if I research agreed them. ( I was paying both halfs of the research agreement). By the time I had conquered my entire continent and extinguished the two annoying sivs that kept attacking me and neutered the other two into vassals (if you bring back an AI that another AI killed, they are very grateful to you). So as the year 1900 rolls around, I control 1/3 of the map landmass as territory under the work of my cities I cover the entirety of a large dorito shaped continent All of my cities are fully producing, have all buildings and are outputting massive amounts of GDP. However, one of the other human players has just researched nuclear theory and I’ve just figured out Great war infantry. I still have not caught up but I have made massive gains. I know I can’t close the distance at this rate though. I am in an open alliance with this player as I am buying the tech off them still. I’m probably sitting on $50,000 with a thousand s coming in every turn. I pay off every single NPC to attack them
This immediately puts me at war with every single non city state NPC. However, I am an Island fortress and 2/3 of my GDP is generated from intercity trade among my own cities and the tree between my civilization and the city states that dotted in my territory. (Did you know you can upgrade their tiles for them). The last third of my income comes from direct trade with two other human players. I immediately deployed my Navy to secure safe travel for my cargos between those ports. Due to the fact that the other human that’s winning is an Atlantic Ocean away from me and that I am on paper still their Ally. However, I’m also the one that just initiated the surprise ai attack of most of the remaining ai against them. ( We were playing with 12 civs 24 city-states huge map and I’m pretty sure nine civs declared war at once). By the time my first naval ships made it to his shore escorting my trade shifts. He had already lost five cities and his civilization was in revolt due to unhappiness. By the time I landed my first troops, 10 turns later to start pushing back the attack and unconquering his land. I had also attained nuclear theory while he had been stalled the entire time due to unhappiness and revolts and The invasion. By the time I had reconquered his land, I was sending up the final pieces of the space station.
One time I played a Mario Party 8 minigame against my family, a rather simple game where you shoot 5 cards and you get to either add to or multiply your score.
I’d very quickly figured out that there’s a maximum score and the two ways to obtain them. We practiced once and I intentionally shot whatever cards as a misdirection while the others were trying to figure out a good combination. My advantage was specifically not giving out any hints and trying to quickly going from practice to the real game with only 30 seconds to think.
I won that, there was only a little grief given to me about it, but I felt so bad. It was then that I realized I didn’t like winning by intentionally withholding or giving bad advice. From then on I revealed these sorts of tricks, if only myself knowing about them would be an unfair advantage.
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.
Only in Scrabble.
I’ve played TCGs for 25 years, I’ve made plenty of awesome plays… But it’s the bad plays that haunt me…
