I play a lot of board games with a handful of guys that I work with.  They’re usually involved board games – much more complicated than something like Monopoly or Scrabble.  I was introduced to them by an old co-worker and haven’t really looked back since.  I know a lot of you have played some of the same games and know what I’m talking about.

In playing different games with the same guys over and over, just like repeated activity of anything else, you learn their patterns.  Mind out of the gutter!

Last night we played a game called Vinci – it’s one of my favorites.  If you’re bored sometime, I can set up a game online and we can play on the web.  In Vinci, you control the rise and fall of civilizations, which usually means you have to act aggressive towards other civilizations to win.  It’s a war/expansion/strategy game.  I played with Jason, Karl, and John – who I’ve been playing games with (almost) every other Tuesday since last October.

Jason’s pattern is to whine and insist that he is losing and all is lost so that people won’t attack or mess with him – and to make sure that I don’t win.  For some reason, because I’ve played a lot of the games they’re playing for the first time, they expect me to win every time.  I do win a lot – but not to the level where Jason has pegged his vengeance.  Without fail – if Jason can do something to keep me from winning, he’ll do it.  I usually plan accordingly and still end up winning, or a least beating Jason.

John is our rules lawyer, and sort of unpredictable in his play style.  He does bend rules in his favor when possible, so we have to stay on him.  You know how in chess, once you’ve moved your piece and taken your hand away from the piece, the move becomes permanent?  John insists that the chess style rule be in place for all our games – except for him.

Karl is a pussy – he is usually in a position where he can do things to win the game or to extend the game by challenging any score leader, but if it involves conflict, he’ll avoid it and do whatever maximizes his points, even if it means he loses the game horribly.  The best part is that he’s arrogant about it – sure that he’s doing exactly what he needs to – and then he’s befuddled when he finishes in last just about every time.  Bonus facto about Karl – he’s got a coffee mug that declares “I am smarter than you” and is a gigantic Apple snob.  I secretly (yeah, right) love when he loses horribly.

Last night in Vinci, I was in a prime position to win the game.  You see – in Vinci, if you are the score leader, people tend to target you to keep you from winning, and tend to forget about the player in second or third place.  In a close third place, Jason (in second) and Karl (remotely in last) had to act against John to keep him from running away with the game.  I didn’t expect that Karl would do anything to help out – so I called him out on it.  I announced that in this game, like any other game, he would do what maximized his points even if he lost.  It’s the Canadian way (he’s part Canadian or something, which he never lets us forget).

Challenged, now he realized he had to attack John – and for John to not win, there was really only one move he could take – agreed upon by all of us.  So what did he do?  A combination of his predictability and his surprising choice to move – he attacked John in the worst possible way – but in a way that gave him the most points … and still let John have enough points to run away with the game … and still placed Karl squarely in last place.  It was surprising and retarded.  So – he broke pattern, kind of.

I place the pattern gun on myself a lot to see if I’m predictable.  Usually I switch it around a bit and try to mess with their heads.  Usually I’m the most agressive – performing turn actions that screw everybody, sometimes even myself.