How To Sabotage A Board Game?

[Lord Poe]

What the title says. I want to compile a database on how to completely sabotage a board game without being blatant about it!

For instance, what's the best way to sabotage a game of Clue? or Monopoly?

[Mr Bean]

Clue, Prentend your the killer, regardless of if you know or not
Monopoly Go Directly to Jail and stay there after getting a few rows of houses.

[PainRack]

Risk- Fort up your border with 14 plus armies.
Monopoly- Own 1 entire strip of the game. Especially the strip around the jail area. I remember how my bro managed to achieve that through a mixture of bankrupting another player, trading and luck. Let's just say that I absolutely refused to go to jail after that.
Battletech- Deploy a map with a river on the opponent starting edge. I got myself suckered into this and forgot to factor in the river when doing my initial deployment. My mech got stuck in the river and essentially burned to death with round after round of fire.

Alternatively, there is the magic 6 die.........:D:D

[El Moose Monstero]

Risk- Fort up your border with 14 plus armies.
Monopoly- Own 1 entire strip of the game. Especially the strip around the jail area. I remember how my bro managed to achieve that through a mixture of bankrupting another player, trading and luck. Let's just say that I absolutely refused to go to jail after that.
Battletech- Deploy a map with a river on the opponent starting edge. I got myself suckered into this and forgot to factor in the river when doing my initial deployment. My mech got stuck in the river and essentially burned to death with round after round of fire.

Alternatively, there is the magic 6 die.........:D:D

Border stuff on Risk isn't the answer - to thoroughly undermine a game, the best answer is to put all your 3 reinforcements on 1 territory and just sit there building and building, we've had games where we've left someone in out of pity with 1 country. 2 hours later, they get bored and steam out of their 1 country with 50 odd troops and go on a kamikaze wave of destruction. It effectively terminates the game because it utterly negates all previous strategy and leaves people picking up the pieces.

[Julhelm]

Monopoly = Immediately lay claim to the bottom, most expensive two strips (either will suffice) then quickly build hotels, and anyone who happens to land there will be bankrupted.

[Ace Pace]

Monopoly = Immediately lay claim to the bottom, most expensive two strips (either will suffice) then quickly build hotels, and anyone who happens to land there will be bankrupted.

Thats not really sabatoging, thats standerd gameplay.

[Nephtys]

Battletech, custom: Be the worst human being in existance, and get yourself a custom clan setup with as many ER PPCs as you can fit, no heatsinks, some armor. Alpha strike anything that moves with a to hit roll of at LEAST 9 or 8, then wait a turn to restart. Ouch.

[Glimmervoid]

What the title says. I want to compile a database on how to completely sabotage a board game without being blatant about it!

For instance, what's the best way to sabotage a game of Clue? or Monopoly?

Do you mean playing unfairly and to win. Or cheating by doing stuff to the game before others arrives (e.g. removing cards that are bad for your style).

[HemlockGrey]

You people are too complicated. I usually use weighted die.

[RedImperator]

What the title says. I want to compile a database on how to completely sabotage a board game without being blatant about it!

For instance, what's the best way to sabotage a game of Clue? or Monopoly?

Sabotaging a game of Monopoly is easy if there are enough players. Simply refuse to trade anything on the grounds that people are trying to screw you and you won't have any of it. In a game with more than five players, it's likely every player will be holding a piece of a three, four, five, or more person deal needed to get the game moving. If the dice fall your way in the beginning, you can grind the entire game to a halt. Eventually, everybody will give up because it's almost impossible to lose if there are no hotels on the board.

Of course, this strategy works best if you have others as stubborn as you playing. There's a risk if you pull this trick that everyone else will cut a deal without you, even if some of them have to take a loss to do it, just to get the game moving, or to screw you (usually both).

[Ace Pace]

You people are too complicated. I usually use weighted die.

So give directions for making weighted die.

[Nephtys]

You people are too complicated. I usually use weighted die.

So give directions for making weighted die.

Find the side you want to come up on top. Drill holes in place of each dot. Fill in the holes with something lower-density than the dice, like putty, and fashion it to look like the original holes.

[Lord Poe]

Do you mean playing unfairly and to win. Or cheating by doing stuff to the game before others arrives (e.g. removing cards that are bad for your style).

No, don't care about winning. I'm talking about doing things that will make someone go WTF?? and it won't be immediately apparent.

[bilateralrope]

Monopoly Go Directly to Jail and stay there after getting a few rows of houses.

The official rules of monopoly (well, the rule booklet that came with the star wars collector edition monopoly claimed to be the official rules) limit you to being in jail for 3 turns, meaning that your plan wouldn't be possilbe unless you agreed to play by modified rules that allow that (I have no problem with people who agree beforehand to play be an altered set of rules)

[Ford Prefect]

WEll, I haven't played a game of monopoly that doesn't feature some pretty strange rules, like having Balin travel round the board tracking down players for cash, you being conscripted by the British Empire to go to war, games featuring the Apocolypse, games of Combat Strategy Monopoly involving teams and fighting and of course the good old Al Capone feature.

However, a good way to undermine a game is to swich your opponents properties around. Or better yet, make sure that everyone is cheating, but not know about it. That's a fun game.

[2000AD]

Do you mean playing unfairly and to win. Or cheating by doing stuff to the game before others arrives (e.g. removing cards that are bad for your style).

No, don't care about winning. I'm talking about doing things that will make someone go WTF?? and it won't be immediately apparent.

There's the unconventional money steal in Monopoly or simular games.

Lick the bottom of your hand and in your opponents turn suddenly say something like "That's not right!" and bring your hand down on their money pile while pointing at something.

Apologise for interupting when it turns out you're "wrong" and take the money stuck to your hand with you. If you get noticed you can put it down to sweat or something and if you don't you should be £/$ 100 up if you played it right (£/$ 500 are too noticable).

[RedImperator]

An easy cheat in Monopoly is to volunteer to be the banker and deal yourself some extra cash at the beginning. $500's are too obvious, but you can easily slip a pair of extra $100's into your pile. $20's actually work best for this cheat, because you get six to start, and nobody really pays attention to them, but they're a large enough bill you can make some real money with them. Don't do $50's--everybody runs out of $50 bills right away and it would be suspicious if you didn't.

[Vendetta]

I think all this cheating is getting off the point.

The point is to do something inside the rules that breaks the game.

In Monopoly it's been mentioned that you can effectively grind everything to a halt by trying to get one of each strip, or one of as many as possible, and never trading so that no-one can develop property.

You could also, if you want to think outside the box, start offering (or demanding, if it's a valuable property) real money for trades (though obviously that depends on how flush you are).

[PainRack]

Border stuff on Risk isn't the answer - to thoroughly undermine a game, the best answer is to put all your 3 reinforcements on 1 territory and just sit there building and building, we've had games where we've left someone in out of pity with 1 country. 2 hours later, they get bored and steam out of their 1 country with 50 odd troops and go on a kamikaze wave of destruction. It effectively terminates the game because it utterly negates all previous strategy and leaves people picking up the pieces.

Most of us here play with an army limit of 14.

A more weird way of playing would be to mod the deck before hand, depending on the armies rule you play by. Most risk players don't pay attention to the country deck anyway, so its relatively easy to play shuffle with the deck so that you get armies bonuses. Or alternatively, use tactics and luck to do that....... I still remember how in a two player game, my bro got dealt virtually the entire continent of asia, with only Kamchatka and another territory being occupied by neutrals, while my closest country was at Eastern Australia...... It just wasn't worth playing that game out.

As for monopoly, another way to add difficulty is to play with limited number of houses+hotels on the board . Depending on how low the limit is, it becomes a stragetic choice to either build houses/hotels or grab the more expensive territories or strip. Another way to do that would be to make it such that you can build 1 house on the territory, even if you don't own the entire strip, but with the added limit of being able to build 1 house/hotel a turn only for ALL players, with the honour of doing that by the player having the highest die roll. With all these custom rules in play, it becomes extremely easy to sabotage another opponent development stragety through die roll.

There's also another trick in WH40k. The tabletop terrain can be subtly manipulated such that you have excellent fields of fire to the opponent, but the opponent doesn't due to a mixture of the close target rules and cover. I broke 3 entire units of gretchins and orks with one ten man marine squad that way.

Another way of screwing Btech would be to utterly screw the withdrawal rules. Depending on the scenario, there are times when you're forced to withdraw your mechs through your own mech edge. Knowing that, its possible to push your more heavily damaged mechs STRAIGHT into enemy lines, so that you take forever to withdraw. I once dragged out a 20 hex withdraw into something like 6 turns, irritating my opponent to no end. He didn't want to waste the firepower destroying that mech, as he was already behind on his objectives to withdraw/destroy my 50-75% of my light/medium lances. However, every turn, I kept delaying its move off the map edge by playing around with the walking backwards, into the most difficult terrain I could find, falling down, etc etc etc, while firing its LRM 10 at his mechs. This can also work in Wh40k, although in that game, the opponent can just choose to annihialate your squad as it gains him victory points. It just so happens that in my scenario, he was already behind on his objective so wasting more firepower to take out an errant light mech wasn't worth it. And think of it this way, if the tactic doesn't destroy/force withdrawal your mech, you gain a flank attack. If it does destroy your mech, Bait and Switch. What can I say? Don't play me for oppo. I'm a bastard.

[Stofsk]

You people are too complicated. I usually use weighted die.

So give directions for making weighted die.

Apparently sticking a dice in a microwave does some weird shit to it. I haven't tested this out, and I have no interest in testing it out either. Nor do I know how long you have to microwave the dice for.

Frankly I just don't get the need to cheat with dice (for role playing games, obviously dice games are different).