That is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.

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

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. 😁

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 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

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 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.

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.

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…

Half of the time I play EDH.

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.

I used to play a naval tabletop warfare game called Seekrieg with a group of friends; usually 8 to 10 people participating. It was basically a WW2 sim; the group would split into “fleets” of Axis, Allied, French Forces, whatever the scenario called for and then face off. Each player controlled a ship in a fleet.

The game was played with miniature ships on a large table (or the floor if the engagement was large enough). One fleet would move their ships, then the other fleet would do the same. Once moves were finished each player wrote down what guns were firing and what target(s) they were being fired at. It’s important to note that ships had movement rules based on the type of ship. They could only turn a certain amount in degrees, and only reach certain speeds based on their maneuvers; they’d lose a certain amount of speed in turns, had max speeds, etc.

There were two official methods for playing the game: First was the “statistical” method, where each ship had certain bonuses and hindrances based on historical data, and dice rolls would determine if the ship was successful in hitting their targets. This was the option for “serious biz” players. The other method was much better suited to our group (drinking beer and bullshitting style) and was known as “range estimation.” In this method, players would pick a target and visually estimate the range to that target in inches. When firing was resolved, the actual distance would be measured and hits determined. Players estimated to the 1/2 inch and could hit to the 1/4 inch (ex; if the player guessed 30" range and the ship was actually at 30.25", it would still hit).

Well, during this time I had been working on my degree and had gone most of the way through college trigonometry. The functions and identities were all fresh in my head. We came together one night for a game and as we were setting up I thought I could probably use my newfound skills to get the range estimation down pat. I was given a light cruiser with 8" guns. One of my opponents, who often made terrible mistakes in the game, was given a heavy cruiser with fewer guns, but bigger nastier 12 inchers.

We started the game and the first round closed distance. He outranged me and fired before I could, but missed. Second round I fired a huge spread at his ship, just to range him out (I should note that the actual range is called out when your estimate is checked if you’re within 1/2 inch). So I fired at 30", 31", 32" etc., but in doing so learned the true range to his ship. For round three I wrote down his ship’s turn angles and distances, noted mine, and then calculated the new distance. I fired all guns at his ship on this range; every single shell hit as I had dialed it in exactly. His ship took massive damage and was crippled. Repeat for round 4 and he was sunk. I repeated the performance against other players (though some of them were a bit tricksier in their maneuvers so it wasn’t quite as brutal), but our fleet carried the match without a loss.

Everyone took it in stride, but it also kinda dampened the game. I decided not to do it again since it really kinda shit on the fun factor we were playing for.

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.

Yeah. this was in high school, in my math class, and we were playing a math game.

The way it worked, was that every table was a team, and each team had a “castle” drawn up onto the whiteboard. A random spinner was used to determine a team, who would then solve a problem the teacher assigned. If you successfully solved the problem, you could draw an X on another teams castle. 3 X’s mean that you are out.

My team was out. But, since this was a class, we could still solve problems, and still draw X’s. Our table got selected to solve a problem, and I did successfully. I looked at the board, and realized that only two teams had a single X, every other team had either two or three. In other words, I could choose who won the game, even though I could not win.

So, I started trying to get bids. I tried to get real money, but someone tried to scam me with some “draw the X first” nonsense. But, the other team offered to pay me four of the school’s fake money, and I accepted that and allowed them to win.

I may not have won the game, but I certainly felt victorious that day.