That is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve lost friends playing Risk.

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.

Locking people’s meeples forever in Carcassone by creating unplayable holes in the map is what does it for me

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.

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. 😁

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.

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…

There was this game of dots I played against my 12 year old niece. The game was looking pretty even with two obvious large snakes building up - she ended up making the move that opened up the first, smaller snake for myself, hoping to force me to open the larger one for her. But I purposely didn’t claim the ending squares in the first snake, which let me avoid opening up the second for her. So she was forced to then open up the second snake to me, letting me claim basically the entire board.

The second image explains it better - with the black lines as the setup she left me with, the usual strategy would be on the left, while I played as on the right, with the blue line as my last move.

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.

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.