The Last Time That You Got Angry

About a year ago, I was playing Eclipse with an acquaintance with whom I have had no positive gaming experiences. He had never played Eclipse before. My friend Colleen taught the game while this player fidgeted with his pieces and only directed intermittent attention toward her. He proceeded to miscalculate his resources (in his favor) every turn (all nine) of the game. When this was brought to his attention, he chose to react defensively, rather than owe the error to not knowing the game or being inattentive during the rules explanation. So, in effect, he cheated for 3 hours.

We tallied scores at the end. I had mistakenly forgotten to score points for a system I controlled, only adding the monolith in it. In hindsight, this discovery should have been kept to myself. When I shared my correct score, players had already begun cleaning up some of the system tiles. The aforementioned cheating diarrhea-person then accused me of cheating.

Unicron wrote: The aforementioned cheating diarrhea-person....

this thread is bringing me much needed joy this morning. Thanks all

I'm usually the one other people get angry at because I didn't ship my coffee as mandated or attack to stop someone from winning or whatever. Fuck those people. I'm glad I ruined their night.

I pretty much keep my emotion level at "annoyed" but D&D sessions can get me worked up. Why? Okay, the hallway branches to the left and right. Which way are we going to go? Fast forward a fucking hour later. I'm not making this up. Fucking furious. Up next: Do we let the thief scout ahead for traps? Let's take another extra 45 minute journey of blah blah fucking are you kidding me blah. God forbid if enemies beg for quarter and we take prisoners. Oh, Kord! What to do with the captives? Let us fight about it for 90 minutes! Whatever my opinion might be on the subject I literally do not give a fuck about the outcome after the first 17 minutes of bickering. Just decide already...

Too much alcohol, I had to bail on the campaign.

I've had the pleasure of gaming with Shellhead and as cool as he is an angry & stern Shellhead has the potential to be a terrifying thing. I hope I'm never on the receiving end of drill sergeant Shellhead. I might piddle.

Anyway, last time I was legitimately angry: Battlestar Galactica.
We were playing with some friends of ours and one guy has a tendency to target me in all games of any sort. "Wade is going to be a problem later." "We need to do something about him." I generally don't mind the table-talk, because he's not wrong.
HOWEVER! This game of BSG he and I are humans, the red-blooded-no-glowing-sexy-spine sort. It's only a five-player game but for shits we played with two Cylon Loyalty Cards. We outed and brigged one Cylon early and he decided I must be the other Cylon. Now, normally this would be a reasonable accusation because I can be one sneaky son-of-a-bitch but this game I was very much not. Didn't matter. I was an Engineering (blue card) dude and there just weren't a lot of blue card Crisis Cards or repairs to make so outwardly I had seemed generally innocuous but also generally ineffective through no fault of my own. I had used my actions to activate Vipers and do what I could, but I was just generally a middlingly helpful player. Suspicion was warranted, but not entirely justified. So he spent an action to try brig me. It failed, but too many cards were spent on the back-and-forth so we were a little hamstrung for the Crisis Cards while his turn came back around. So he did it again and that time I got brigged.

Now, you might say that brigging a human is par for the course, and you'd be right. That didn't really make me mad. What made me mad was the fact that after that happened the other hidden Cylon started tanking skill checks that were beyond what I could contribute, so it was blindingly obvious that there was an active Cylon not in the brig, which mean that I was definitely not a Cylon.

BUT that didn't matter to the guy. What mattered to him was that he could't have possibly made the wrong call. Dozens of turns of slow death for the humans ensued. I tried to get out of the brig every time my turn came, and he would save his best cards to keep me in the brig with some of the most ridiculous logical hoops I've ever seen to rationalize that I could be a Cylon. We (humans) lost skill check after skill check that we could have passed, even with me in the brig, just so he could guarantee I stayed in the brig when my turn came.

I spent nearly two hours in a three-hour game in the brig, and I was livid. Not at the game, but at this guy. All rationale was lost and pride took over and it was one of the single most frustrating game experiences I've had.

We still game and I still get along with the guy, but now there's a permanent bit of meta in our BSG games. We're good, but that night I was mad as hell.

I haven't played BSG in recent years, but played it a lot for the first two years after it came out. Never saw any hard feelings in any of our games. There were a couple of games where I practically laughed myself sick because some people are so obvious when they get that midgame Cylon card. They might as well do an evil laugh.

I love that in this discussion people

a) patch up friendships, even if it is years later

and

b) "This is the kind of thing that at the time made me very anxious, and so I started trying to pull them back from the edge." <---apparently learn to be less anxious.

Those are both impressive accomplishments.

I can't recall the last time I got angry playing a game, looking back I can think of moments in which I got frustrated or was kind of a dick but not any situations in which I actually got angry.

I do have plenty of stories of people getting mad at me. I'm still baffled by people who got mad at me for passing in Condottiere lol

Unicron wrote: When this was brought to his attention, he chose to react defensively, rather than owe the error to not knowing the game or being inattentive during the rules explanation. So, in effect, he cheated for 3 hours.

Man this reminds me of that time I invited some guy to learn Netrunner and he blatanty cheated by taking credits out of turn. I even moved the credit pool away from him and he kept doing it. I was so baffled, why would anyone cheat? Why would anyone cheat in a learning game? What kind of person acts like this?

Apparently the guy was some kind of compulsive liar. He kept telling everyone he had a great card and went on exotic trips he obviously couldn't afford. Later on he told me he went to the US to play Magic, had sex with one (female) player there and as "proof" he showed me his deck, which had not a single rare on it. I don't get it, he knew I could tell his deck (and story) was awful, why lie?

He's just really unhappy

Gotten angry at the gaming table:

* Incredibly drunk guy wheedles us into playing Bang, proceeds to do an absolute shit job. It may have been the last game I ever played with him, certainly last game I ever played of Bang. I can thank him for that, I guess. I don't enjoy being around sloppy ass drunk people and this cemented that.

* Asked to play Manhattan Project, as I didn't know if I wanted to keep it or not, since I never could get it played. Everyone agrees. One dude plays and proceeds to piss in my ear about the game for two hours. Utterly miserable session.

* A couple of things like that. Look, I dislike a lot of games, but I try to keep my mouth shut when playing them. Someone else wants to get their game played, I'll do it. Afterwards I may try to explain what about it doesn't work for me, but I try not to piss and moan the entire time. It makes me angry when others do it. If you're going to be an unpleasant shithead, then don't play, but don't do us any favors by playing and showing your ass the entire time.

* I often suck bad at games and do terrible. That's fine; I'm used to that. The games I like, I still have a good time with. But there have been a couple of games where a better player doesn't just make me lose, the game allows them to make me do NOTHING. In a learning game of Serennissima an experienced player came out the gate annihilating me and the other new player. By round 3 there was literally nothing I could do in the game. There are 8 rounds in the game. I just sat and watched. Similarly with Bremerhaven, there's a sort of auction thing where if you lose, it's not that you take lesser powerful actions, you just do nothing. Fuck that. And if you're an experienced player deciding to fuck the noob in their first game to keep your win ratio up? Fuck you too.

* If you want me to teach you a game I will be happy to do so. I'm not too bad at it (assuming I know the game myself.) But if you don't pay attention during the teaching, you're wandering around, chit chatting with others, playing with the dog, browsing BGG (even looking for a player aid) and then complain that you don't know what's going on? Don't ask me to teach anything again.

I know I seem like a angry dude, and I don't deny that, but I'm more impatient. I guess I go into game day (with people who declare themselves to be dedicated gamers) with certain expectations and get frustrated when they're not met. The results of these things (and others) have been: removing myself from a game group, avoiding playing with certain people, taking breaks from attending. I also try to work on myself so these things don't bug me so much.