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.
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.
I’ve played Pikmin 1 so much that my current record is beating the game in 7 in-game days. I feel kind of bad about it since there’s so many ways I’ve played that game that it feels like I’ve achieved a score I can’t possibly top.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Toxic Magic fuckery could fill this entire thread. Hell, just toxic blue deck fuckery could fill this entire thread.
Could be worse, could have been playing land destruction
I’ve played TCGs for 25 years, I’ve made plenty of awesome plays… But it’s the bad plays that haunt me…
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.
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. Our 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.
This reminds me of a game of Bang where I was the manipulative player. It’s a hidden role game, except that the sheriff role is not hidden. The deputy, renegades, outlaws, etc were all hidden roles. The sheriff and deputy win if the outlaws all lose (get shot enough times to be out of the game). The outlaws win if the deputy and sheriff both lose. (I don’t remember specifically the rules of the renegades.) Depending how may players you have, you’ll have different numbers of outlaws and renegades, but there’s always one sheriff and one deputy. But everybody knows how many of each there are even if they don’t know who is what role.
I was an outlaw this game. And I basically just kept telling the sheriff that I was the deputy. One by one, all the other players fell, each at my insistence they’d said something suspicious and had to be an outlaw. (Basically, convincing the sheriff to start shooting a particular player is a death sentence for that player.) When only three players (the sheriff, me (an outlaw), and the deputy) remained I just kept telling the sheriff I was the deputy and trading shots with the real deputy. Eventually, the sheriff sided with me and started shooting the deputy, thinking (at my insistence) he was an outlaw.
When someone dies, they’re allowed to show their role card, so the jig was up when he died. Then it was just a grueling game of the sheriff and I trading shots until one of us was unlucky enough times to take the hit that our health went to zero. I eventually won, but it took forever.
After the deputy died, he admitted that he had suspected something had gone wrong in the shuffling/dealing of role cards and somehow we’d ended up with two deputies. I was apparently that convincing.
That was the day I learned of my talent for manipulation.
So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game.
Well this clearly isn’t true, you just work more slowly
This is an excellent example to pull if you ever want to talk about memetic warfare as a concept.
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.
While you’re obviously not wrong to play the way you like playing, you won because none of your opponents were playing effectively with the strategy Vindictive describes. You can comfortably get a science victory centuries before 1900 without even playing a civ that has science buffs. Someone playing tall science well doesn’t need to ever let the game get anywhere near 1900.
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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.
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.
That is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.
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.
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.
Monopoly is badly designed so that’s a given.
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.
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”
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.
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.
