Have you ever made a strategic play in a game so good it made you feel kindof bad?

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

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 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.

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.

I've lost friends playing Risk.

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.

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 was playing civ 5 with a few IRL friends over internet multiplayer. Victory types : religion scientific or political I had the largest economy by far but I was behind in tech. My military was decent. My religion was the third or fourth largest.

I had made a personal agreement through DM with one of the other human players and asked them if I could put a spy in their Capital and steal the techs they had acquired if I research agreed them. ( I was paying both halfs of the research agreement). By the time I had conquered my entire continent and extinguished the two annoying sivs that kept attacking me and neutered the other two into vassals (if you bring back an AI that another AI killed, they are very grateful to you). So as the year 1900 rolls around, I control 1/3 of the map landmass as territory under the work of my cities I cover the entirety of a large dorito shaped continent All of my cities are fully producing, have all buildings and are outputting massive amounts of GDP. However, one of the other human players has just researched nuclear theory and I've just figured out Great war infantry. I still have not caught up but I have made massive gains. I know I can't close the distance at this rate though. I am in an open alliance with this player as I am buying the tech off them still. I'm probably sitting on $50,000 with a thousand s coming in every turn. I pay off every single NPC to attack them