What do you do with cheaters?

I had a guy who would repeatedly try to not lose sanity and stamina in Arkham Horror, so we just had to watch him like a hawk and guide him through his actions. Who cheats at a co-op game? Seriously?

Personally, I think that cheaters top the fun-murdering food chain. I will not subject myself to the unbridled rage caused by playing against a no morals having fucknut who needs to win, at all costs, at a game that is played as a pleasant distraction.

If there where money involved I'd understand. Not condone, but understand.

Just how fucking sad is your life that you have to cheat to win at a game of Bohnanza?

This is one little problem with battlestar galactica- one game, the humans kept forgetting to move the jump track- as a cylon, is it cheating to not point it out to them? Of course, you remind them a couple of times because its great cover, but after I did that a few times I shut my piehole. Is this cheating or not? The cylons won in a landslide, by the way, thanks in part to 3-4 missed jump tokens.

Cheating to not mention it? or not?

Not. I think this is a case of where do you draw the line, i.e. how obvious must the mistakes be? I'd like to win a game due to skill, not because they made a really daft error. The more unbalancing it is, the more likely that I'll point it out.

EDIT- Haven't played BSG so I didn't pick up on the mandatory aspect, so to clarify: if the rules require it then I point it out, if it's optional or poor play then see above.

hancock.tom wrote:

Cheating to not mention it? or not?

If it's not cheating, it's pretty close. I do think you should mention it. I'm not a big fan of letting a player or players miss something they should be doing according to the rules. If it's a friendly game, then that goes double.

If the player has an option they don't take advantage of, then that's a different story. But even then, I'd still point out the rule. Most of the games we play have a fair number of rules, and considering how infrequently most people get to play a particular game, it's not reasonable to expect players to remember every rule. So we help each other out.

Since I mostly play with my friends we don't have problems with cheating.

Sure we all make mistakes now and then that we all point out, but if the mistake isn't fixable without going back to far I just default to the following ASL Rule:

A.2 ERRORS: All results stand once play has progressed past the point of commission. In other words, if an error is discovered after play has passed that point, the game cannot be backed up to correct that error, even if such error is in violation of a rule.

This rule even has a footnote which ends Ultimately, the only protection against a cheater is not to play him.

Good stuff there.

If one of my friends actually cheated i'd be pissed and probably stop playing the game with him and consider never playing a game with him again.

I have never wanted to win a game badly enough to want to cheat. I play only for fun.
I probably wouldn't go overboard if I caught someone else cheating*, UNLESS we were playing for money. Then the game would cease immediately and I would demand - with menace - all monies returned before letting anyone leave room.

I generally only play with friends so a small amount of cheating is forgiven. If I was playing with strangers and detected cheating, I wouldn't play with them again.

* Actually, during a recent Poker game I busted one of my friends peeking at his Wife's hand. I outted him for this and got a guilty acknowledgement in return. Wasn't serious though as there wasn't any money involved.

Don't think I've ever really spotted someone cheating, but I game in such a small community that it's quite probable that everyone of them play for fun and has enough respect for the others not to cheat ... or maybe I'm just not hard enough to designate something cheating rather than a mistake (especially as I probably make more mistakes than most of then).

We have a little thing called 'takee backee' in our groups where someone can quickly redo their turn if they're quick enough to ask and haven't annoyed too many people already.
Then we have a rollback where if someone has made a genuine mistake and it wasn't too long back and it is going to severely fuck them, then we will attempt to rectify it - example last night in Power Grid, someone bought some oil but when it came to powering-up we pointed out he needed coal, since he would have been screwed in the game we just swapped over the items ... he ended up winning .
Then there is when someone has just forgotten to do something and the game has moved on - if it is something minor he'll be allowed to quickly do it, otherwise tough.

The various people I play(ed) with all allow rollbacks. In my book, it's definitely a sign of relaxed friendly play.

We frequently do roll backs.

Gary Sax wrote:

The one that drives me completely and absolutely insane is dice manipulators. People who don't roll fucking dice correctly, they instead carefully hover it barely above the table and sort of flip it to try to get the result they want. It drives me fucking insane, there is one guy I play with who does this. Yes. I see you doing that. I know what you're trying to do, AND I DON'T FUCKING LIKE IT.

And it's tough. I guess I should call him on it--"roll your fucking dice like a man you idiot." But it doesn't always work and it feels so minor. God damn.

Man, I think this is a cultivated Jedi skill among a certain subset of wargamers in particular. We're all trained to try to control dice-heaving so you don't accidentally scatter 800 counters all over the place, yet I regularly see guys who use that restrained die-roll approach to damn near *place* the dice on the table. They'll even tell you that they don't want the dice to scatter, dontcha know....

Fortunately, the folks I regularly play with now are for the most part "box-lid craps shooters", but I was very close to buying a fucking dice tower(an item that, prior to meeting a few unrepentant dice manipulators, I thought completely absurd) after dealing with a couple of folks like that.


As for cheating; well, I'm apparently a "Barnes"--deliberate cheating? Never. However, I've learned to point out to any opponents that my graduate degrees in history are direct evidence of my complete dearth of math skills, so please assume that I can't count. Feel free to check my math at any time; I won't be offended.

My regular crowd also has the "oh shit that was stupid, can I fix that?" rollback allowance. If you catch it before, say, the other guy has already pushed 8 1"-high stacks of counters to respond to your move, you can fix it. If it's something like 2 turns later when the realization hits that we've either screwed up a rule or simply made a completely dopey move, then the ASL "ya gotta live with it" rule kicks in [e.g., in Paths of Glory, when my friend [playing the CP] and I both realized at the same time that his moves managed to create a completely undefended path to Berlin that could trace multiple supply routes to my Russian forces in the East--he just had to live with it as we'd have had to rollback 3 turns worth of moves)

Sadly, I just started my first game of Successors, and it's a VASSAL/ACTS game with 3 guys I've never played with before. I've already had a moment that I'd like to roll back [placed my PC markers without thinking of where I was going to be moving one of my generals; so I've got PCs going West and my only army in the area needing to go East] but, since ACTS immediately emails out the move/play emails, I don't want to look like a complete schmuck in the 1st phase of the 1st turn. *sigh*

My non-gamer wife thinks I should buy a dice tower because the rolling annoyed *her*

Dogmatix wrote:
"I was very close to buying a fucking dice tower(an item that, prior to meeting a few unrepentant dice manipulators, I thought completely absurd) ..."
Absurd but fun. Alhough:-

Gary Sax wrote:
"My non-gamer wife thinks I should buy a dice tower because the rolling annoyed *her*"
Then don't buy an acrylic one because the noise is pretty loud!!
(I bought a couple that Richard Dewsbery made with rods, much better than the Dice Boot baffles.)

One of my gaming mates (fellonmyhead over at TOS) produced a dice tray when we had a game of Fortress America a year or so back. I was a bit bemused but it was an excellent idea in the end - with a large board and small units all over the place, you can pass the tray around and then still get to roll the dice rather than drop them down some tower. I've used a box lid in a similar situation (I think it was with the new Conquest of the Empire) where the game board was using all the table space and was cluttered with pieces.

I've always been a box top roller too. But I couldn't resist Richard's towers. Noisy as hell: very Ameritrashy!

Incidentally, fellonmyhead and I had a vocal disagreement on T.O.S. We patched it up like adults. Then the hall monitor appeared huffing and puffing...

EDIT- Told us if we didn't stop then we'd get a warning. I (and probably fellonmyhead did the same) told them it had stopped several posts ago. We still got a warning.