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The Last Time That You Got Angry
Describe the last time that you got angry while playing a boardgame. Not just displeased or annoyed, but actually angry. Which game? How along ago? How did you express your anger? What made you so emotionally invested in the situation? Was there any fallout from the incident? Did you win the game?
The last time that I remember getting angry during a game was maybe in 1999 or 2000, when we were playing a six-player game of Jyhad (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle) at my apartment. One player was new to the game, and was struggling to remember the complex turn sequence for each round of combat, playing cards too soon or too late. Because he was new, a couple of us wanted to be lenient, correcting him each time and then letting him replay properly.
But Jyhad is a very cutthroat game, with your two greatest enemies sitting on your immediate left and right. Those two players got impatient with the new guy and started verbally harassing him every time he messed up. I tried to intercede each time and calm down the table talk, but they persisted. This got to me, because I can't stand anything that resembles bullying.
Finally, I slapped the table hard, and shouted down the two offending players. "THAT'S ENOUGH. KNOCK IT OFF, OR THE GAME'S OVER AND YOU CAN ALL GO HOME." They started to protest, and I resumed, "NO, LEAVE HIM ALONE." My veteran friends have told me that I do an excellent imitation of a drill sergeant voice. We finished the game and played something else afterwards, and I can't even remember who won.
I never saw the new guy again, or the one harassing player who I also had just met. However, the friend who brought the new guy was very impressed with me after that, and we became much closer friends over the years.
The other guy that I yelled at was also a friend, and that friendship dried up for a long time. We occasionally played a game together if other people roped us in, but otherwise kept our distance. But he got a job at the local game shop, I kept running into him over the years, and gradually we became friendly acquaintances again. When I was unemployed for a long stretch in 2013-4, he invited me to his monthly boardgame event, and it was fun. I finally stopped going because more than 30 people were showing up and there was only enough chairs and tables for about 24. I still see him at the game shop, and we're fine.
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Maybe 5-6 months ago I was playing argent with my wife. Now she has this thing where we decide before the game if we're going to use all of the take that stuff or hold back. We decided to hold back this game, she was a bit tired.
So she spends the whole game using this fucking super power that moves my mages to other spaces, moved them to other rooms, etc. Meanwhile I'm passing up clear nuke opportunities on her early placed purple mages. On like turn 5 I finally lose it after she moves two of my mages from key spots. I lose my shit and point out to her that, if anything, moving mages is actually worse than nuking or banishing them since you get no compensation and can't place them again. She just isn't buying it---moving mages isn't "mean" to her. She whips my ass like 10-2 and I just grind my teeth and walk away.
We didn't play argent for some time after that.
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- Cranberries
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- Black Barney
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In a board game? I'm not sure it's ever happened. Probably BSG. That game is way too thematic. Screw you Ken for getting me hyped for that friendship-mine
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We were playing a pre-release for a new Magic: The Gathering set, and it was a 2-headed giant game, where teams of two play each other on a completely new set of cards. The whole point of a pre-release is that it is fairly relaxed for a tournament because everyone is new to the cards, particularly once you play 2 headed giant, so it is more about learning the cards than serious competitive play. I mainly only play Magic with my daughter, and with her as a team at pre-releases because we aren't interested in cutthroat competition or paying lots of money to get top decks. This tends to mean we aren't perfect with our rules particularly less common ones.
So we are playing our first game in a pre-release and we manage to get a planeswalker in our packs for only the second time (which are a fairly rare and specialized card with a whole set of different rules and due to our circumstances we hardly see them), and in this game and I managed to get it out in play. One of our opponents cast a card that imprisoned one of my creatures (Compulsory Rest), and the imprisoning card had a special feature which gave the creature imprisoned the ability to pay a cost and sacrifice itself to get a minor benefit. Our turn was near an end, and I looked at the imprisoned creature, and decided that I had some spare mana, and while the minor benefit was pretty much irrelevant, my mana would go to waste otherwise, so why the hell not activate it.
So I do this fairly irrelevant thing on a whim, and one opponent says "because you use the activated ability of a creature, you take 2 damage and we direct that damage to your planeswalker and it dies". "Huh". The opponent opposite my daughter points at a card (Harsh Mentor) which is about as far from me as is possible (a good meter/yard away). So it turned out that due to a rare card I had never seen before and which was sitting in a place I couldn't really read, comboing with another new card for me in a very rules specific way, and using a rule I had never heard of (damage to a player can be redirected to one of their planeswalkers), I managed to lose our best card on an irrelevant whim.
I called the judge to find out what the hell just happened, to understand the rule I had never heard of, and to ask for a take back (quite rightly not given), complaining about how far way the card was and that I couldn't be expected to read it, complaining that the cards were new, and I shouldn't expect to know every combo, etc. And all the while my opponents were sitting there smug, taking a quiet delight in my frustration and anger. So in the end it didn't really lead to anything, apart from the fact that I still fume about it to this day.
I think the thing that pisses me off the most was the fact that the key card was so far away from me that I couldn't read it, and it being a new and rare card, couldn't reasonably expect to be aware of everything it does. It just felt that it went against the spirit of the event, which was for everyone to learn the new cards. I think it also goes against the sort of player that I am, as I am pretty forgiving of opponents misunderstanding of rules and tactics, regularly allowing take-backs if someone didn't truly understand the full implications of what they were doing (I genuinely believe I would have pointed out that combo to an opponent when it hit the board so as to teach them about the cards).
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That time I was attempting to teach Republic of Rome at WBC and the jerk who had played once years in the past kept interrupting my explanations with his own despite being repeatedly told to quiet down and we could clarify or answer questions after.
The time I was playing a complicated game with a fellow who after I made a good play that hurt him said "Well I wouldn't do that then..." and proceeded to take back his move thus invalidating the three turns prior that I had spent getting into position to do what I had done.
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- Black Barney
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Another time just a few months ago, I was playing Chicago Express. By weird circumstance, I ended up the only owner of Yellow stock. It's a risky/dumb move, but it was very early in the game. One of my opponents built rail directly in front of my line that didn't benefit him, but completely hosed my line. It was a perfectly legitimate move, but it was also a total dick move. I don't know why I let it get to me so badly, but I was totally furious. I tried to calm myself and just play it out. Fortunately the game is usually short enough that it doesn't matter, but I had to do whatever I could to make sure that guy didn't win (he didn't). And that kind of made me mad, too. His blocking move changed the way I got to play the rest of the game, which I resented as well.
Ordinarily, I'm a very easy-going game player. However, lately I think tensions in my regular life have started to creep out when playing a game. Like, I wasn't really mad about my wife's die rolls (but actually, I was), but I was inwardly mad about her usually getting her way in our relationship. And I wasn't mad about my friend blocking my play, I was mad about my current life situation feeling like it's blocking my options.
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- SuperflyPete
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Guy keeps moving his models and then returning them to the wrong space because he was 1 space out of range and was trying to cheat me. After the second time I whipped out three pennies and set them on the spaces his models started at and said "Look motherfucker, this is a game and it's pretty clear you're way too serious about winning. That's fine, but if you keep trying to cheat moves, you and me are going to have a major fucking problem." Eyes got big, he stopped doing it.
SAME TOURNAMENT. My buddy Jason was watching me play and being the most absurdly evil "color man" announcer ever. "Man, Pete, that sure seems like a bad move...." "Wow, really? You want to do that?" "I didn't realize this was your first time playing this..." This went on for at least 20 minutes.
I spun around and gave him the look of death, reminding him that if he didn't shut up, I'd drag him out of the convention center by the heel, knock his ass out, and wake him up by pissing in his face.
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- SuperflyPete
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cranberries wrote: I'm actually seeing a therapist about my anger. Fun fact: men over forty can only express anger. There are no other available emotions.
I'm 42 tomorrow and the vast majority of my emotions boil down to love, lust, and disappointment LMAO
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Another time, this guy (Human) was convinced I was a Cylon and threw me (fellow Human) in the brig/jail/whatever the hell they call it in BSG, because we got in an argument about how best to deal with the bajillion Cylons that popped up. I was more than a little pissed. When the game ended I waved the card in his face and called him an ignorant asshole. I wasn't that pissed off about getting thrown in jail, because that just means someone is a better salesman than I am. What I was pissed off about was that this dude was absolutely convinced he was a BSG genius and was right, so if we didn't agree I must've been a Cylon. Fucking moron. I'm pissed off about it all over again, but with a smile on my face this time.
* This friend would get off and on my wife's shit list, because she hates unsolicited advice, and he would offer it about anything, whether he was knowledgeable about it or not. I offered her bowling advice one time and got that spousal death glare thing. "Okay, no advice, got it."
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- Black Barney
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RobertB wrote: When the game ended I waved the card in his face and called him an ignorant asshole.
lol, sounds awesome
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- san il defanso
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The angriest I've ever gotten was in a game of Battlestar Galactica (which has come up in this thread more than any other game, I think). This was with several first time players, all of whom were friends. So far I had had almost no negative experience from the game in terms of conflict, but two of my friends were starting to really get at each other's throats. This is the kind of thing that at the time made me very anxious, and so I started trying to pull them back from the edge. When they kept elevating, unreasonably to my mind, I became more and more agitated, until I finally stood up and said, "Guys, if this is how we're going to play this, maybe we shouldn't play it at all." I had to leave the table to get a drink, I was so pissed off. It turns out that these two people were neither one of them angry, but were instead trying to get the other person so angry that they would admit to being a Cylon or otherwise screw up. Instead I was the one who lost my temper. It was a big enough deal that the host of the game night (which was at a church) told me that if I couldn't control myself at future game nights, I don't need to come back.
The much more recent example, but a lot less explosive on my part, was just a couple years ago. This was at my one and only game of Mega Civilization. I was there was a lot of other industry insiders for a Twitch streaming event organized for charity. We had a full eighteen players, and we went long into the night. As in any long game with eighteen players, there were really only about two or three at the table who were remotely in shooting distance of a victory, while the rest of us were just keeping our seats warm. At about 1:30 AM, after a good 16 hours of playing, I was in a situation where I was able to make some kind of choice where it was between getting to finally end the game and go home by letting a particular person win, or in prolonging the game in what was theoretically the "best" choice for me, even though I had basically no shot of winning. Once this choice became obvious to everyone at the table, I had a lot of people canvassing me back and forth as to which I should choose. The only people who really wanted to keep going were the people who also had a shot at winning, and they were pretty irritated that anyone would consider throwing the game. But most of the rest of us were so exhausted that we didn't really care who won, we just wanted to go home. The pressure got really pushy from both directions, to the point that I felt lots of people's enjoyment of the experience was hinging on my choice (some people made this explicit to me), and I was definitely angry about being put in that position. I didn't blow up, since I was very aware that we were still live on Twitch, and I was invited particularly because I write for Miniature Market so I didn't want to put them in a weird position. But I definitely took on an attitude that said I was pretty much done. I believe I chose to let the game continue, but I ended up bailing on it about 30 minute later anyway.
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