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.
I think I’m about to take liberties with the term “strategic play.” But I’ll tell this regardless.
I have a friend who is only hyper competitive when playing games, especially board games. In the moment, he wants to win so badly that he will do anything to win. He manipulates, gaslights, he’s dangerously intelligent and he’s good at making it seem like he’s just playing casually. And then once the game is over? He doesn’t care at all whether he won or lost. It’s infuriating sometimes.
Thanks to also being an extremely competitive person, I saw through it pretty quickly the first few games I ever played with him. But nobody else does. It seemed like nobody ever tried to win by comparison. So when he and I are in the same game, I know I’m going to lose. And he’ll use the other people at the table even if I can see it happening. Even if I made comments about it mid-game, nobody would believe me.
So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game. Instead, I turned him into a meme. When he ever looked like he was behind, and someone noticed, I’d say in a light-hearted conspiratorial way, “[his name] is always ahead.” Repeated it whenever he would take the lead and eventually when he won the game. “You see? [His name] is always ahead.”
It caught like wildfire. My other friends started using the catchphrase, even in games where I wasn’t there. People started using attack cards on him more often. They’d be less friendly with him about trading. People would snub him even when he was so far behind there was no catching up. The day I realized how much it got to him, was one day he told me how much that phrase impacted his ability to play games with friends. It ruined a lot of his fun. Sometimes new friends who didn’t even play with us that often would use it. I didn’t realize how much damage it caused. All I wanted was for people to be more wary of his manipulation tactics. But instead I took something fun from a good friend and made it miserable.
So I haven’t said it for years since. But our other friends still remember and will say the phrase from time to time. He’s always ahead.
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.
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”
That is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.
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.
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.
When I played with my much older brother when I was a lot younger I never let them him play with his black deck that was built around his ivory tower card because it was so annoying. I still almost always lost but at least I had fun.
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.
I was undefeated in my office at wwf because my brain is happy to just sit for hours and try every single combination of letters until it discovers a word that’s allowed. i also played very defensively like the commenter above you.
They were playing a word game and i was playing a strategy game with bonus stimming!
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
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.
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’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.
I saw your other comment and wondered what the games must be. What’s the other one?
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
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
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.
Well, there’s your problem. Civ 5 had a thing where research took more science points to complete the more cities you had. The ideal number of cities to own was five. If you had even a single city over that, even if science output was maxed out in all cities, it would take longer to research anything than for a player with only five cities.
I’m pretty sure I ended it with 25 cities and roughly 500 to 600 science per turn output. Just because there’s an established way to play doesn’t mean that you can’t find alternative paths with the proper civ.
I think you’re missing my point because I knocked out a science civ with pure gold and warfare and then switched my focus to science and outscienced a science civ.
Most people go tall or wide. I go wide and tall. It takes a very long time but once I get production ramped up I am literally unstoppable. It’s just a matter of time. Cities can easily accommodate a population of 20 with internal happiness at that age.
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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.
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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.
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/.
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I sincerely hope you’re a teenager or autistic
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I am absolutely not going to take advice regarding mental maturity from you.
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
