Game Night Freak-outs

Ken B. wrote: Zev, any tips for getting brains and blood off of cardboard?

Yeah - buy a new copy of the game

But in all seriousness, I do not recall any freak outs in any of my games though maybe there was one or two by some player - but nothing memorable.

While playing RPGS, there were a couple of freak outs, but it was taken out on the player's character in-game (cause it was the player who was making his character piss people off). I, myself, was jumped on by my whole team in-game - and it was the funniest, greatest event of all time and I still regale people with the story of Dragon Mountain and my character. If you care to hear it ask me at some show.

And some of you hit it on the head: games are fun. Even in a tournament I'm cool-headed (unless a guy is cheating, which almost never happens in fun play but tournaments bring out the schmuck in many people). My board game time growing up is playing and chatting. We chat about different things and the board game is almost secondary. Like something to do with the hands while talking.

That is also why I can have fun playing bad games: it's totally the people I'm playing with that can make any game fun. Even if it means making fun of the game we are playing.

Shellhead wrote: I didn't know this guy, he was the friend of a friend, and neither one of them knew any of the other guys at the table. Two other guys started getting really upset over his inability to get the combat rules straight and started verbally harassing him. No threats, just constant and aggressive criticism of his stupidity.

Suddenly, I reached my limit. I'm tall but not heavy-set, but I can make my voice go really deep and really LOUD. My oldest friends call it The Voice of Doom. I slapped the table hard and said ENOUGH. I loudly reminded these two guys that Jyhad is difficult game and this guy hadn't played before.

This isn't really a game night freak-out along the lines of flipping a board over a stupid game. That's a legit beef with guys treating someone who is struggling to learn a complex game like shit. I would consider more of a freakout on the part of the dudes tearing into a newbie, that stuff just isn't cool. I have no idea how bad it was, but I'd definitely speak up and say something if this was happening. Making sure newbies are comfortable and have a good time is everyone's responsibility, dammit.

I usually take the self-depreciating approach of describing how stupid I was at learning a game, or point out that if we're playing something with lots of parts (*cough*Through the Ages*cough*) I STILL need a third party to check if I've done things right. Believe me, I have plenty of anecdotes about dumb shit I've done. It takes the heat off the newbie and deflects it to me, which is fine.

Some of you know The Boy (and someday, most of you will!) but anyway, we were all playing Fireball Island, set it up on the floor for some reason (I was at least in my 20s at the time) and he got right fucked out of winning at the last second, stood up and straight punted the idol right off the mountain and stormed off. Little bastard.

At WBC playing TI3 with Mike (Malloc) and some rando it basically turned into a game of which of us could fuck him harder while blaming the other. Mike won that particular metagame and I swear there were a few moments right at his breaking point where that dude did some serious considering about jumping over the table and punching me.

I've pissed off a handful of other rando people at WBC by being pretty drunk, seemingly harmless and then pulling a grand fuck over on someone to win the game. Dudes that take games serious don't seem to like it when a drunken fool bests them while gloating over their corpse.

I don't think I've ever gotten worked up over a game. But there have been times where I just got up and walked off at cons and stuff. I remember one game of Castle Panic at WBC where some randos invited themselves and then argued over the rules for a while. I went to get a drink and never returned...

Ya know, I can't ever recall myself or anyone in the group flipping out on everyone, plus with the people I play with it would just mean further harassment... I would actually love to see it happen because I think it would be hilarious. My brother will rage out at people once in a while but not to any crazy extent and people know that's just the way he is.

I would write off other people's behaviors as completely ridiculous and taking things way too far, but twice at work over the last year I've raged into a mode where you are not really conscious of your actions so I guess I can understand. Once it was typical verbal abuse stuff that 99% of the time I can ignore, but on that night it pushed all the wrong buttons and you react without even thinking about it, regret was the first thing I felt well after the deed was done. I'm sure what I would consider a "trivial" matter could set that off in someone.

I never have any real freakouts unless I'm playing with my dad, in which case there's bound to be a good amount of bitching back and forth between the two of us. Neither of us will ever back down from a confrontation with the other, no matter how futile and petty it is, and neither of us will ever admit to being outplayed by the other, so it can get pretty vicious and innocent bystanders sometimes get caught in the middle. I regret that it is that way, but it's an incredibly difficult dynamic to try and break. My brother and I are even worse; we just can't play games together unless it's co-op.

The best, most recent one I have outside of that happened during a game of Phase 10. I was frustrated as all hell with life in general at the time, and I'd lost something like 9 card games in a row, and for some reason, I was getting extremely irritated that I couldn't catch a break long enough to win one goddamn card game.

So, I get my hand, and it's all shit. Pretty much unplayable. I start muttering to myself "This is fucking ridiculous. 9 fucking games in a row... what the fuck?" Suddenly, one of the guys at the table starts laughing. "The fuck are you laughing at over there?" No answer, but the laughing increases in intensity. "Seriously, what the fuck is so funny right now? Nobody's even done anything!" Laughter becomes stereo cackling as the other player has now joined in. "Are you two out of your fucking minds!? Fucking giggling like a couple of lunatics! What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Laughing. At!?" They say they'll tell me at the end of the round. "BULLSHIT you'll fucking tell me at the end of the round. You fucking tell me right fucking now!" They're pissing their pants at this point. "You're both fucked in the head. Just so you know. There's absolutely nothing happening right now that would cause any sane human being to be shitting themselves with laughter. Are you fucking high or something?" They're choking on laughter...

The round ends, and one of the guys shows me the score pad. There was medium-sized column of hash marks on one side, and a HUGE one on the other. Turns out, they were keeping a running tally of the number of times I sighed, and the number of times I swore during each round. This particular round, my sigh count was somewhere around 30, and my swear count could only be tabulated if we rented the Watson computer for a few days.

Of course, the only response I could come up with was "Oh, bull_shit. You're just fucking with me with that. There's no goddamned way I swore that many times in 3 mintues. You guys are just assholes. I gotta' put up with this shit?"

One of them reeled back with his cackling so hard he broke a chair.

The only board game night freakout I've seen was when I was playing Dune at a church game night with several people I'd never met before. About halfway through the game, the Guild player starts whining and complaining about how everyone is ganging up on him and how he wanted to quit. The rest of us managed to talk him down and we finished out the game, coincidentally with him winning the default Guild victory. I hope I never play with him again.

Interesting things have happened at our poker nights, however. This isn't really a freak-out as much as a spectacle. There were about 10 of us around the table, including the woman the host was seeing at the time, and her friend Sarah. The two women were pretty much drunk and being loud and irritating. At one point they start throwing poker chips at people. Not out of anger, but in that "I'm drunk and oblivious to my actions" kind of way. As those chips might as well be his children, the host announced that the next person to throw a chip would have to leave. So they settle down, for a time.

We tend to use card protectors, which are little toys or widgets to set on your cards to keep them from getting mucked accidentally. So anyway, I don't remember what triggered it, but probably nothing but her alcohol-addle brain, but Sarah picks up her card protector, which happens to be a little terracotta car souvenir, and throws it across the table at our friend Aaron. It bounces off the table and hits him in the forehead. He immediately stands up and starts shouting at her. Then he said, "If you were a guy, we'd be going outside right now." Aaron's wife responds by saying something to the effect of, "I'll do it, let's go outside." There was a 'bitch' inserted somewhere in there. Aaron agrees. At this point the host tries to calm everyone down, and Aaron repeatedly, and loudly, tells Sarah she needs to leave (and I think most of us agreed). The host calms everyone down and we take a break, although strangely, the host doesn't really do anything about Sarah. I found it odd that his poker chips were a no-no but someone gets his in the face and he shrugs? My personal theory is that he didn't want to piss off his girl by throwing her friend out, which is pretty shitty, but whatever. Aaron and his wife leave when it is clear that Sarah is staying.

Ken B. wrote:

ZMan wrote: When I was a kid, we were playing Risk and I had like 14 dudes fighting one dude in Siam, with the hope of taking over Australia. The SOB rolled like a fiend and beat every one of my guys, with the last 4 rolls being 6s.

I was so pissed I took a hammer and caved his skull in, but I didn't stop hitting until Australia and Asia were covered with his brain and blood.

The others were laughing their f'ing asses off, way before LMFAO was invented.

What?

Zev, any tips for getting brains and blood off of cardboard?

It was Risk: Legacy, and the brain chunks added to the character and value. The whole of Germany wept.


As an aside, because I am a peoplewatcher, and at GenCon I have ~my friends~ and then there's everyone else, I play with my friends, but back at a room after the day's events. The rest of my time is spent walking along just checking shit out, taking pictures, all that jazz. I'm in it for the fun of the experience and the shit you just can't see anywhere else. I mean, I can play any game I want pretty much 3-5 days after I decide I want it, so why try to squeeze all that gaming into a couple days at GenCon when there's SO MUCH MORE to do?

So, I've seen Magic players flipping out, I've seen wailing, gnashing of teeth, screaming, a couple of pussies pushing each other with cigarettes in their mouths out front of the halls since Indy is a no-smoking city...but that Star Wars thing was the best because I got to stand there and watch the guy disintegrate.

We've seen some very testy Heroscape matches at GenCon, because while the tourney scene outside of GenCon is really mellow, the fangs sometimes come out with some of the dickheads that have something to prove. (Myself included, twice...but I'm claiming provocation in both cases).

There's a guy on Heroscapers.com who is an engineer, goes by the handle Dok. Arrogant son of a bitch. Everyone hates playing against him because he's constantly taking notes on each move, constantly commenting on the rules and whatnot, constantly just being a nitpicky little bitch. I played him and it was cool, I just asked him nicely to quit talking so fucking much because it was starting to be irritating and he was cool with that, and so we chatted about Colorado and whatnot. I found him to be pleasant after that. But then..then came Tom. Tom is my buddy from Costa Rica (he's pictured holding the bottle of rum in my 2011 Gencon Magazine) and he's one of the nicest guys on the planet. He'd go to jail for STEALING a shirt off of someone's back to give to you kind of guy.

Anyhow, the one thing he HATES is Heroscape Geniuses. He's won the championship like 5 times and he's always so mellow, so courteous....but he played Dok and it was a fucking catfight. Both of them were acting like dickweeds, but he was more direct and Dok was more passive aggressive. It was fun to watch. He ended up losing and was PISSED, but he was still cool about it. Don't think Dok got spoken to by anyone for 2 more days.

Another guy, LeftOn4Ya, always leaves his shit lying around. I know the guy fairly well and he's a smart guy, funny, good personality, but just isn't quite "right", I guess, socially, and he can't seem to remember shit. Well, he carted around a whole bunch of Heroscape stuff, some quite valuable, in case someone wanted to trade with him. Well, at Origins a bunch of thuggish looking dudes came up and apparently swiped a bunch of his shit, and then later in the year at GenCon, someone swiped a bunch more of his shit, really expensive stuff, that he left lying around.

I feel bad for him to this day because he's a nice guy, and always is cool to let people use his armies and stuff, but man, he just keeps getting jacked and it's really fucked up.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I much prefer it when someone gets out-and-out angry, instead of merely pissy and whiney. Anger tends to blow over quickly, but the whiner will ruin the game for the rest of the night.

My recent league of Das Motorsportspiel had a league rule that you could have one temper tantrum per evening. One guy got pissed enough at his dice that he threw them across the room. I generally think that's a good rule to have at any game night. We all lose our cool sometimes, and for us it's nice to have an acknowledgment that at the end of the night we will still be friends and will still play games together.

One freak-out that I wasn't there for involved "mrbeankc" from BGG, if you know who he is. He lives in the area and goes to game night at the store I frequent. Apparently one night he played BSG with some other friends of mine and started moaning about how everyone else was picking on him, which then amplified their torment of him. He was apparently almost reduced to tears. I am glad I wasn't there, but in another more accurate way I'm sad I missed it.

I snapped on a guy at a 40K tournament once. I don't remember what edition it was in, but due to the rules at that particular time and the end of his unit I had assaulted he was screwed.

He kept offering to let me assault much deeper into the unit than my movement would allow "to do me a favor, trust me it'll be better" which actually was going to expose my dreadnaught to his anti dreadnaught power fist and be an illegal move.

so after a few times that he insists I not follow the rules because it'll be better for him, while he insists it's going to help me, he finally just takes my model and moves it where he wants it. I politely move it back and say "i'll just go where the rules say to" He insists on moving it back like three times and acting like he's doing me a favor. So we've now exchanged about 7-8 times about this, with the last three times him moving my model and me politely putting where it belongs to when he reaches for it again I'm all

DON'T FUCKEN TOUCH MY MODEL AGAIN YOU PATHETIC POWERGAMING PERMAVIRGIN

and the whole place goes quiet for a giant awkward moment. We finish our game with no talk outside of what is necessary to finish the match.

No freak-outs that I can recall. But one guy at the game club is usually an obnoxious asshole, apparently getting more enjoyment from irritating people than from the game, so I suspect one might be due...

San Il Defanso wrote:
" But after that the host of the game night took me aside and told me that if I had any more outbursts like that I was welcome to not come back. I felt absolutely AWFUL about the whole thing,"
That seems grossly unfair. They get away scot-free for creating the situation? Fuck that.

mjl1783: That's priceless!!

Notahandle wrote: San Il Defanso wrote:
" But after that the host of the game night took me aside and told me that if I had any more outbursts like that I was welcome to not come back. I felt absolutely AWFUL about the whole thing,"
That seems grossly unfair. They get away scot-free for creating the situation? Fuck that.

They weren't raising their voices: I was. It was actually a pretty brilliant tactic to act as upset as they did, but it merely encouraged each other to keep going. I was the only one taken in. And they actually apologized to me afterwards.

I seriously felt terrible, but we laugh about it now.

Nothing too extreme here. A few years ago, 5 or 6 of us would get together and play games and have a few drinks. We always met at my best friend's house. I can't even remember what we were playing -- maybe Bootleggers -- but one of the guys gets extremely obnoxious when he has too much to drink. My friend was having a rough night and the guy was just giving him all kinds of shit.

My friend stood up, lowered his shoulder, hit the guy like a full-on tackle in the gut, put him over his shoulder and carried him up the stairs and out of his house. Came back in and finished his turn.

Every year Game Towne in San Diego has Game Fest. Used to be a big deal, got pretty lame in the last 10 or so years and dwindled to about 15 store regulars attending. A mix of RPGs, minis wargames, and a group of guys that play euros from store opening until they get told to leave around midnight. Not normal people playing those euros, the worst case scenario of really fat (save one) old guys wearing the same t shirts with dragons on them that they wore last year at Game Fest. They only played with each other and nobody ever wanted in on their games. You only saw most of them at Game Fest. The one skinny guy that played those euros (who was married to a regular at that store- a charming balding woman who would stand behind you when you were playing games and talk about how bad the game you were playing was, sometimes for hours but that's another story) was obviously getting riled during some euro that had cards involved. He got louder and louder until he threw his cards and yelled at the top of his lungs "DON'T TELL ME HOW TO PLAY! DON'T TELL ME HOW TO PLAY!" and ran out of the building. It was pretty fucking weird. He was not seen again during Game fest which was unusual since I think that little gathering was a high point of his life. Come to think of it those eurogame guys always had at least one meltdown every year but that was the best one.

That same year me and a friend staged a fake meltdown that we planned out ahead of time and culminated in me yelling "DON'T TOUCH MY DICE MIKE! I'LL FUCK YOU UP!". It went pretty well, lots of freaked-out looking game players when we did it, but the store employees didn't know the other guy very well and were getting ready to throw him out. He had to come get me so I could tell the employees it was a joke. Ah, Game Fest.

I bought my first Player's Handbook at Game Towne. I still love going when I'm in town, though it's lost a lot of it's magic since I was 6.

I'm posting one preemptively:

At WBC 2012 Loter saw Weeks playing Dune, while standing over the table to see better. Loter ran up and Gorilla fucked him while the Bene Gesserit player correctly predicted Weeks was secretly enjoying the Gom Jabbaring he was receiving. Loter wiped his dick off on the tablecloth and strolled on in his Snow White outfit while sipping on spiced rum.

Weeks tried to stand, but was too weak. Just then, Scott Nicholson walks by and said to him, "God created Arrakis to Train the faithful. One cannot go against the word of God" just before plowing balls deep into him...thereby completing the "training" of the faithful.

and Weeks wept, but tears of joy.