I’ve been very slowly trying to introduce my children to the kid’s version of Monopoly and it brought back very fond memories of tyrannical board behavior by myself and others.
I desperately wanted Boardwalk and Park Place for years, to be thwarted, yet my mom would quietly get the crappy purple properties of Mediterrean and what not and just crush her children with her slum rentals.
Who knew my mom could be so cut throat?
I used to play at an extremely cut-throat level, any boardgame that came allong. Then one day I suddenly grew wizer. Now I play board games to enjoy myself, and allow the other players to enjoy themselves, that is the ultimate board game strategy!
MAybe I grew wiser, but I never grew to be able to spell.
In Monopoly I always insist that I must be banker, then I cheat.
In chess I try to intimidate my opponet by making my moves very quickly, though I’m only an intermediate player I’ve played enough games to know what move I’m making 5-6 moves in advance.
I do the slumlord thing too, although in my experience it’s a great strategy for the first hour or two of the game, but the people with the high-rent properties really gouge you in the end. This is a shame, because I adore being a slumlord – the best part is making up names for the hotels on Baltic and Mediterranean (“Shady Slim’s Flophouse ‘n’ Funeral Parlor, Sandwiches Sold”).
Does anybody else name their Monopoly properties, or am I just really weird?
Monopoly: My strategy consists of securing all properties that people are forced to land on. They are:
Railroads, Utilities, Baltic, Ventnor, St. Charles, St. James, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Boardwalk. All of these properties have cards in the Community Chest and Chance decks that direct players to your location.
I also nearly bankrupt myself buying properties from the onset. You can always trade a property for rent, but after all the properties are bought up, there’s no other way to make money.
Scrabble: Use the maximum number of tiles in every play. Block the double or triple letter and word scores if you are not able to use them. Reserve your blank and high point tiles for combination in words coinciding with triple word scores. Always lay down unfamiliar words like adit, taler and quern in order to lure your opponent into challenging you and thereby losing a turn. Make sure to use a high quality dictionary if the official Scrabble dictionary is not available. Save your “S” tiles in order to pluralize another word and start from there. This maximizes your point intake.
Chess: Immediately dominate the center and begin deploying minor pieces. Avoid moving the king or queen until you must. Castle early and often. Chain your pawns and avoid getting any reversed, isolated or hanging. Get your rooks into play before too long and then win, win, win.
I’ll be back with some more later.
Did someone say Monopoly?
I buy everything I possibly can and do my very best to force housing shortages and make people bankrupt on me so I get their stuff. I studied the book on ROI for properties and I just love the game. Anyone foolish enough to follow the www button to find my online list of my collection of monopoly crap will see I have serious problems. (and that is not everything I own - need to update)
Of course the only person who ever plays with me anymore is Parallax. Poor guy.
He also loses a lot of scrabble games as I spent some time as an English major and he’s a computer geek. I used to crush my mother on a regular basis but we moved a bit far away for playing regular scrabble games.
I’m not very good at chess but I do know how to play 
I have a game called Klondike which was kind of like Monopoly but set in the goldrush days. Instead of Boardwalks and Park Places, you were buying saloons and cabins. (No idea if this game still exists, I got it from some Yukon relatives when I was a kid.)
For some reason it became family tradition to cheat as much as you could while playing. Stealing from the bank, trying to snag the “Mother Lode” cards, moving pieces the wrong way, etc. You had to keep an eagle eye on your opponents while at the same time you’re trying to shaft them.
I’m not a good person to play boardgames with anymore.
In college I played a game called The Settlers of Cataan so frequently that I became rather obsessed with strategy. The key thing to recognize is that since the board is different each game, there is no formula for choosing your initial placements. Technically, placing on wheat and stone tends to be better than the other resources, but there are cases where the other ones would be better. A general rule is too get the largest spread of different numbers possible, and too never place below one ‘dot’ short of the optimal total production that you can get.
Scrabble. Don’t play with my dad. He always wins. He’s an author, so he knows all kinds of weird words.
Well, for RISK, I take the “Hide in Australia” approach. Highly defensive position.
In general, my strategy is to crush my enemies, to see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Actually, I guess it’s more a philosophy than a strategy.
Cheat.
Cheat some more.
Shout abuse.
Kick the other players in their shins.
Kick them harder if they roll a double six.
Let the other players know that I despise them, that they smell, that they are amazingly ugly (as are their children) and that they are stupid gitfaced morons who should be letting me win because I’ll stab them repeatedly in the face if they don’t.
Cheat a little bit more.
Attempt to distract the other players by shouting, “Look, a werewolf!”
Last bit of cheating.
Throw the board and pieces into the air in disgust.
Storm off muttering that it was a stupid damn game anyway.
I used to rule at Stratego by means of counterintuitive set-up - surround a 7 (whatever rank that is) with mines, so that when my opponent used his 8 to clear the mines, he’d lose the piece. The flag would be someplace unmined, but with enough high-ranking pieces nearby to see off any enemy pieces that strayed into the area.
In retrospect, that sounds kind of pathetic.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ITR champion *
In college I played a game called The Settlers of Cataan so frequently that I became rather obsessed with strategy. The key thing to recognize is that since the board is different each game, there is no formula for choosing your initial placements. Technically, placing on wheat and stone tends to be better than the other resources, but there are cases where the other ones would be better.
If I may offer some advice, your strategy is too static. Focus on brick and wood in the early game, with an eye to swarming onto rock and wheat hexes as the game progress. Use roads to block people from taking your rock and wheat spaces if you can (easier in a 3-player game than in a crowded 4-player game.) Nab brick and/or wood harbors, also, and those brick and wood hexes will pay off the whole game.
Do not worry about sheep. Exception: If you can get a monopoly on sheep, DO IT. People will trade ridiculous things for sheep if they’re desperate.
Everyone likes sheep. Sheep say baa.
BTW, there are only two a’s in “Catan.”
When I play “Trivial Pursuit”, I always try my best to get all of the answers right when questions are asked of me. When I do that, I always end up winning.
I like being a Monopoly slumlord too. I can use up most of the houses and collect relatively large rents while my opponents are scraping together the funds to finance their high-rent districts. By the time they do that it is often too late.
In Risk my main goal at the outset is North America - only three points to defend and it gives you five extra armies per turn. If South America is then conquerable you get another continent but still have only three territories to defend. I will also do the “hide in Australia” tactic as a side strategy if it comes easily, but if it seems like all of the other players want it, and they usually do, I abandon Oz quickly.
**Chess ** Trash talking my opponent is always an excellent strategy. Cheating helps too.
Scrabble My best friend in 8th grade and I ( or is it me.?) came up with a rule to deal with the tangle of crappy letters that you can’t dump back in to pick out more. (We had limitations on dumping them back in.
You make up a word, say it’s Qolxc. As you try to give a definition of what exactly a Qolxc is, your challenger has to try to find where that word would be in the dictionary if it were indeed a real word. If your opponent were faster, then you didn’t get the points. But if your definition were just dumb then you didn’t get it either.
Cards (mainly poker) play the pretty while eveyrone else drinks themselves into a stupor. Slowly saving the good cards ( a couple of pairs, nothing too flashy) then at the end of the night, use this pair to win the big honking pot ( all nickels) with no one the wiser. I’ve done this a few times.
Risk: I like to capture and hold Asia. No, really. OK, that’s a lie. I use the Aussie Gambit as well. The only reasonable second option is South America, unless you are playing with pacifists. That damn Asia-American land bridge! How can you transport all those armies over a dotted line anyway?
Monopoly is simple, develop first. The red properties are the best statistically because of the “Advance to Illinois Ave” Chance Card and the cost to rents ratio, if you really want to crunch the numbers. Of course, a hotel on Medeterranian early in the game takes all the fun out of passing Go. As mentioned, the longer the game lasts the more important it is to have the more expensive groups developed. But, If you’ve ever watched someone tiptoe through your expensive properties with hotels and beat you with two houses on Vermont, you already know that rolling the right numbers is the best strategy.
In Warhammer 40k, there are tons of annoying strategies that sorta exploit the rules. My strategies-
My Space Wolves have a counter-charge ability that lets them charge an enemy who assaults them. This allows more of them to get into base-to-base contact, and since these guys are monsters in close combat, its something I want to happen. So I’ll get two squads, and overlap them a bit so if an enemy assaults me, they’ll inevitably come in contact with guys with both squads, who will counter-charge, and cause one massive dogpile on enemy squads.
My friend’s strategy- He’ll have an Avatar of the Bloody-handed God standing right next to a Wrathlord. Pisses me off to no end- I can’t shoot at the Avatar because the rules say you can’t fire at an HQ unit if there are other targets in range, and the Wrathlord’s toughness is so high its immune to half the weapons in the game. So realistically, I can’t shoot at either, which is good for him, since both these guys also kick ass in close combat.
Most of our games consist of 3 turns of firing at each other and advancing, and usually by turn 4 we are in assault range and there is usually a huge clusterfuck of assaulting models in the middle of the board. At this point we are usually so tired and confused we just call it a draw.
Oh man Monopoly brings back memories…my family used to play that once or twice a month or whenever we forgot just how much a fiasco the last time was…the problem?
We ALL cheated…my mom would cheat…my dad would cheat…my grandpa would cheat…oh yeah I might of cheated now and again too
But jeez it was fun…it wasn’t even the game that mattered we did the same with any type of card game too
It was just all being together doing something as a family that was fun…we made up our own rules and had a blast
As far as games where cheating wasn’t an integral part of the game I go on the offensive always