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.
Half of the time I play EDH.
Yeah, the first time I played Magic the Gathering with a friend’s husband was in a 4 player Commander game. I had let kept less aggressive and made it look like I wasn’t too much of a threat, all the while holding a combo that could deal quite a few points of damage, but would sacrifice a lot to do it. I waited until just the right moment, the turn before I was about to be defeated by the last standing player who was doing really well. And I won. 😁
I had let kept less aggressive
You seem to have an autocorrect disease, please seek treatment before brains are broken and you can no longer be understood.
(Meant to be funny)
Yeah I switched to a new keyboard app. Seems like it needs some tweaking. Lol.
This is why I lose in Magic the Gathering so much. I’ll be like “wow what a combo, I could go on but this is mean enough.” And then two turns later I lose to a mean combo. I don’t think it’s actually mean, the goal is to win. I just think it can be more fun to not have huge plays, even if that results in more losses.
Locking people’s meeples forever in Carcassone by creating unplayable holes in the map is what does it for me
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…
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.
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.
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.
Never feel bad for pulling insane shenanigans in munchkin. That’s liberally what it’s for.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Ewwww a blue player!!!
I did similar with slivers. I never once lost a FNM, made my whole family rage quit except one of my brothers who’s dad made him quit because of his anger issues. People at the shop always talked big like they could sideboard something that totally invalidates slivers but they never did. Nobody had a deck that was an all around winner. We all had some kind of gimmick and my gimmick was just better than everyone else’s.
I went the opposite, I went elf deck against casual players. My combo would go off turn 2-3 and it would use Priest of Titania and Archdruids to create 20 to infinite mana and win with Staff of Domination or Emrikul. I loved it but every win felt bad.
Edit: the start combo was heritage Druid, Nettle sentinel, then Quirion Ranger and Wirewood Symbiote to just pound out mana with Priests and Archdruids.
Sounds like legacy stuff. I only ever played standard.
I played standard tourneys from Shards of Alana until Rise of the Eldrazi! Then I made a legacy elves deck to smash randos for fun.
I played between 7th edition and Planar Chaos or Future Sight. Idk which one was later. Maybe some Ravnica stuff? I had a few 4th edition cards incidentally somehow.
Nice! I never played anything but casual until Shards… but I’ve got cards dating back to unlimited. Nothing super exciting, unlike my friend… who absolutely has power nine. I had been out of playing for a while and he’s like “yo check this out” and hands me a pile of old cards, not in protectors, just naked. Top card, Library of Alexandria. I was like “okay I’m guessing this pile is pretty spendy” and he informed me library was about a thousand USD.
Edit: Jesus… that’s gone up a lot. His is between lightly played and near mint.
Heh, don’t remind me. I had like $3k retail worth of cards and sold them all to an upcoming card shop owner so I could afford to eat when I was homeless. After that, wizards went and power creeped and put in the village Planeswalker cards and suddenly MTG was less strategic deck building and more “buy the expensive and have better ramp.” It’s full-on broken now and I wouldn’t go back even if someone bankrolled it for me. The game just isn’t what I used to be obsessed with anymore.
Could be worse, could have been playing land destruction
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.
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.
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!
Blue black?
Probably. It was mostly black but I can’t remember anything more concrete except one of my cards I called the “race card” because it eliminated all white cards, including your own, from play.
I’d still have the deck itself, along with a ton of other things I had before graduating high school, if my parents hadn’t just thrown practically everything I owned away when I left for 5 months to work on a cruiseship.
Not that it could be used in tourneys these days… A good chunk of them are probably banned by now because they were NOT balanced lol
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’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?
Monopoly. My oldest two siblings are absolutely cutthroat when playing it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Playing Diplomacy I’m pretty sure violates the Geneva convention.
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 from 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.
