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. 😁

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…

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 is literally how you are supposed to play Dixit.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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’ve lost friends playing Risk.

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.