Gaming with Strangers

As mentioned in another thread I started, recently I had my first ever meet up with a stranger in my area (found through BGG) to play games. It went well enough and I was introduced to the glory of Space Hulk. Huzzah!

But I was bracing for things if they went wrong. And even if it had turned out miserably, at least I'd have a good story to share here, right? So that's what I thought I'd ask you guys n' gals for- Any good stories about gaming with strangers?

(I know this topic is thrown around a bunch on The Leading Boardgame Site, but I also know that they are boring... like my story actually... and that here I'll get a lot more entertaining and colorful stories.)

In my experience, total strangers are generally okay to play games with, because everybody is on their best behavior. It's the old friends that you need to worry about sometimes, especially if there is alcohol involved.

My worst gaming experiences were generally when we had the standard, every friday game night and some people would bring their friends along. Sometimes against their will... and it would be listening to them bitch or be catty toward the nerd activity.

Generally these were not hosted at my house, or I would have been a bit more blunt about the 'don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out' suggestions.

Shellhead wrote:

In my experience, total strangers are generally okay to play games with, because everybody is on their best behavior. It's the old friends that you need to worry about sometimes, especially if there is alcohol involved.

Oh god yes, you are so right. If you ever used to game with someone and they had a little quirk that used to annoy you sometimes, imagine how annoying that'd be if you gamed with them after a 5 year hiatus.

--Mike L.

In my experience, total strangers are generally okay to play games with, because everybody is on their best behavior.

Zzz...boring night at the AGE OF STEAM table...

It's the old friends that you need to worry about sometimes, especially if there is alcohol involved.

Whoa! Did Robert Martin just drop the C-Bomb on poor ol' Steve Avery? Why would anyone take their pants off in a game of NUCLEAR WAR? Who set this crappy game on fire?

After literally hundreds of bad experiences playing with strangers, at this point I'm pretty much against gaming with strangers except in very controlled situations. Beware the sheepish "mind if I join?". Fear the insinuating "This game takes six, doesn't it?"

A couple of weeks ago I played my first F2F game of HERE I STAND...this guy I didn't really know wanted in...we only had five, so I caved. And it turned out that he was a great gamer. So it depends...carefully controlled situations are the key. I don't recommend walking into a random game event and hollering "Who's up for some motherfuckin' PUERTO RICO" for example.

Most of my gaming friends, perhaps all of them, were met through gaming and thus complete strangers to me before that. However, there were also a lot of strangers I gamed with that didn't become my friends and a select few that I would not want to see again. Nowadays I mainly game at home with friends or at friends' homes. So dealing with strangers is a thing of the past.

Maybe I've just been really lucky with the events and pickup games at conventions, sitting down to play with total strangers and having fun, sometimes even making new friends. But one of the worst gaming experiences of my life was with my original gaming group. These were the guys that I started playing D&D with in junior high, and some of us had known each other since grade school. So, nearly a decade of gaming together at that point.

We were playing Car Wars on a Friday night, while drinking. Indianapolis is a car-crazy town, so even gamers got into the spirit, playing lots and lots of Car Wars. During college, we even had an annual event in May, Indy versus Bloomington, with the hometeam representing people living in Indy or attending Purdue, and the away team was the guys going to Indiana University. But after 8 years of playing, we were ready for a really big event. Five teams of two players, one referee, and a custom 3-D map that covered an entire pool table in somebody's basement.

I will spare you the details. But everybody wanted to play, so the referee ended up being the one guy in our whole group who didn't play Car Wars, ever. We started at eight, and were done by midnight, but there were a couple of controversial rulings, and the team that won the whole event included the best friend of the referee.

So people start arguing right after the game ended. And arguing, and arguing. Voices were raised, insults were made, and eventually completely irrelevant personal issues got dragged in, like who was a bad driver in real life and who cockblocked who at the bar two weekends ago. Only a couple of guys had the sense to leave, everybody else stayed and argued rather than admit that they were wrong. Finally, the sun rose, and I left, calmer (or at least very tired), but fundamentally unhappy with some of my old friends. We stayed friends, but things weren't quite the same, and over the next couple of years, several people drifted away or moved away.

Another time (I promise to keep this one short), we were playing Nuclear War while drinking, only one guy was snorting coke and doing shots of Tequila. When he got taken out late in the game with my retributive strike (my last attack because I had just been eliminated), he flipped the card table and started ranting about evil bastards ruining everything. There were no lasting hard feelings that time, and I actually became roommates with him and another friend a few months later.

Shellhead wrote:

In my experience, total strangers are generally okay to play games with, because everybody is on their best behavior. It's the old friends that you need to worry about sometimes, especially if there is alcohol involved.

But, on the other hand, gaming with friends is way more fun than gaming with strangers. People (including me) tend to be a bit shy about trash talk around strangers. Also, "on their best behavior" is sometimes worse behavior than that of a drunk friend.

(just a counterargument. I agree that generally total strangers are great)

That makes sense. I guess that gaming with friends has a greater potential for extremes... extreme fun and/or trouble.

One of my old friends rolls dice in a peculiar motion like a pantomime of jacking off... he holds the dice in a tight fist above his lap and vigorously shakes the dice up and down before finally releasing them by flipping his hand open, palm up, so the dice roll across the table. If a stranger did that, I would consider it a little odd and also amusing. But seeing my old friend continue to do it even after we have mocked him repeatedly... it's just annoying.

It's been said that familiarity breeds contempt. That's harsh, but there is something to it. There are things that my girlfriend does that seemed endearing when we were dating, but annoying now that we live together.

Oh yeah, and there is the guy who quit our AmeriTrash group last December. I met him through mutual gaming friends about five years ago. I started inviting him to my boardgame days maybe 3.5 years ago and even did some non-gaming stuff like going to movies and helping each other move into new apartments. But he is a really large guy, and he uses the words "poop", "poopy" or "pooper" in every third sentence. And I finally noticed that he was using my bathroom frequently whenever he came over. So I joked about his bathroom visits in a discussion over at BGG, and he reacted by ending the friendship.

Aarontu wrote:

People (including me) tend to be a bit shy about trash talk around strangers.

With good reason because you never know how personally some people will take things. Once in a game I took something away from a guy I'd never played with before. It was to strengthen my position early on, but because I attacked him instead of the current leader he stated that he would spend the rest of the game making sure I lost. Restating that every time he wasted every one of his turns doing something just to screw me. If I hadn't held back on my "TAKE THAT, BITCH!" comment because he was a stranger in the initial attack I seriously think he'd have hit me. Whereas with any one of my friends we'd have trash-talked each other for a few minutes then moved on with the game normally.

Mad Dog wrote:

Aarontu wrote:

People (including me) tend to be a bit shy about trash talk around strangers.

With good reason because you never know how personally some people will take things. Once in a game I took something away from a guy I'd never played with before. It was to strengthen my position early on, but because I attacked him instead of the current leader he stated that he would spend the rest of the game making sure I lost. Restating that every time he wasted every one of his turns doing something just to screw me. If I hadn't held back on my "TAKE THAT, BITCH!" comment because he was a stranger in the initial attack I seriously think he'd have hit me. Whereas with any one of my friends we'd have trash-talked each other for a few minutes then moved on with the game normally.

Yeah, you unfortanatley never know how some stranger might take something.

On a related note, the first time I played Ca$h 'n Gun$ was at a local game group thingy, and most of us were strangers to each other, so there wasn't ANY trash talking, threatening, intimidating, or anything like that; probably like playing Diplomacy without any negotiations. I thought it was pretty fun anyway, but when I finaly got to play it with my wife and some friends, we had a blast and it became one of my favorites.

I've met quite a few strangers to play games, and it's been generally quite favorable. You realize soon who your friends are, and who aren't, like any group of people. Once you meet a couple of awesome people, they tend to introduce you to other awesome people and pretty soon the awesomeness is spilling out your ears and you have a good game group going.

As for gaming with friends, the most awkward situations were with my old roommate would whine incessantly in games and would throw down his cards in anger and storm out of the room after he had lost. He did this one game when I killed him in Dungeoneer, one of the simplest least emotionally committing games I've played. God, what a fucking child he was. Did I mention he was 35?

Though I tend to be shy around new people, I must say that I've meet some great gaming friends by gaming with random strangers. Went to a game night, random person invites me over to his place for some euros, meet new gaming people over there, eventually end up playing with a group that plays TI3 a lot. All these people are very nice and friendly.

Fortunatley, the strangers who don't know how to behave, even around strangers, are relativley few (or in the minority, anyway).

Although, after thinking about it, conventions are another animal altogether. I can't imagine going to a game convention without knowing 3 or 4 people in passing at least. I've met lots of weirdos, but quickly had to learn to avoid large sections of the gaming rooms for more time with the wargamers. Is it just my experience, or are wargamers generally the most "normal" or all the gamers?