A friend/coworker of mine and his wife hosted a weekly boardgame night that I attended. Most of the other guests were kinda flaky, and this one particular day, I was the only one who showed up. So it was just me, my friend, and his wife.
Someone suggested Dixit, which I had never played before, but it sounded fun and I was down to play. So we broke it out, shuffled, and started the game.
Now, if you don’t know how Dixit works, it’s basically a deck of cards with pictures on them. One of a toy abacus. Another of a child pointing a toy sword at a dragon. Another of a winding staircase with a snail at the bottom. Etc.
In one version of the game similar to Apples to Apples or Scategories, everyone gets a hand of cards which they keep hidden. The dealer announces a clue and everyone (including the dealer) contributes a card from their hands face-down to the center of the table and the dealer shuffles them together and reveals them all at once without revealing whose card is whose. Then players vote which one they think matches the clue. You get points as a player if others vote for your card or if you vote for the one the dealer picked. As a dealer, you get points if close to 50% of the players vote for yours.
I was the dealer this round. One of the cards in my hand was of a ship’s anchor. That’s when it came to me.
See, the friend/coworker and I both worked in web software development. His wife didn’t. And I came up with the perfect play. I gave the clue “hyperlink.” Hyperlinks on web pages are created using the HTML <a> tag. The “a” stands for “anchor.” And any web developer would know that.
When the vote came in, I got one vote for my card from my friend and his wife failed to select the correct card and so didn’t get any points. It was a slam dunk move. But I felt a little bad for excluding my friend’s wife from an inside-knowledge thing.
The next round, my friend was the dealer and he picked a rule/card that was an inside-knowledge thing between the two of them. (A line from a poem they both knew well, the next line of which related to the picture of the card.) So I was glad of that.
This reminds me of a game of Bang where I was the manipulative player. It’s a hidden role game, except that the sheriff role is not hidden. The deputy, renegades, outlaws, etc were all hidden roles. The sheriff and deputy win if the outlaws all lose (get shot enough times to be out of the game). The outlaws win if the deputy and sheriff both lose. (I don’t remember specifically the rules of the renegades.) Depending how may players you have, you’ll have different numbers of outlaws and renegades, but there’s always one sheriff and one deputy. But everybody knows how many of each there are even if they don’t know who is what role.
I was an outlaw this game. And I basically just kept telling the sheriff that I was the deputy. One by one, all the other players fell, each at my insistence they’d said something suspicious and had to be an outlaw. (Basically, convincing the sheriff to start shooting a particular player is a death sentence for that player.) When only three players (the sheriff, me (an outlaw), and the deputy) remained I just kept telling the sheriff I was the deputy and trading shots with the real deputy. Eventually, the sheriff sided with me and started shooting the deputy, thinking (at my insistence) he was an outlaw.
When someone dies, they’re allowed to show their role card, so the jig was up when he died. Then it was just a grueling game of the sheriff and I trading shots until one of us was unlucky enough times to take the hit that our health went to zero. I eventually won, but it took forever.
After the deputy died, he admitted that he had suspected something had gone wrong in the shuffling/dealing of role cards and somehow we’d ended up with two deputies. I was apparently that convincing.
That was the day I learned of my talent for manipulation.