Clattertron

[dc]T[/dc]o butcher a phrase, those who can’t, cheat.

And those who can’t cheat, lose. Usually.

Not that I condone cheating when it comes to board games. Although, some would argue it is only cheating if you get caught, and this is also the reason my sister still refuses to play Monopoly with me (see previously).

But, is it cheating if you don’t know you are cheating?

This was the scenario the other night when I joined Ken and Francis for a game of Small World (the Days of Wonder game, not the Disney ride/song/ear worm).

Small World is similar to Risk in regards to conquering parts of a map. Instead of armies and dice, you have quirky fantasy characters with special powers and magical abilities. The interesting part of Small World, is the special extra powers for each race can change every time you play (similar to the random layout of Settlers of Catan).

And unlike Risk, Small World has a set number of turns.

No twelve hour games here (although Ken deciding which race to be can make it feel as such).

I made the mistake of starting a game of Risk around 9PM once. Once.

We were still playing the same game at 7 AM the next morning (but Australia was MINE, dang it, and the sun would never set on the Holy Hogan Empire). The game only ended because most of us passed out due to sleep deprivation a couple hours later.¹

Back to Small World and my unintended cheating.

A race I chose, the Sorcerers, has an ability to take over weakened enemies. This helped me rack up a bunch of easy points.

After I racked up 10+ points a few turns in a row, Francis decided to read the rules again.

“You cheat!” he shouted.

“What?”

“You’re cheating!”

“How?”

“You can only use that ability on active races!”

I had been using the Sorcerers power on races in decline. When a player runs out of race tiles, they go in decline and can pick a new race on their next turn. A single tile remains on the player’s conquered land, which was what I was zapping for extra points.

“Oops,” I said after inspecting the rules myself. Sure enough it read: “On active races only.”

“Italics doesn’t mean you can ignore the word, Dan,” Francis huffed.

“Look, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You still cheated!”

I shrugged. “Not if I didn’t know I was cheating.”

“That’s my fault,” Ken said. “I should have double checked.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Francis said. “He should know what the rules are. And not cheat!”

“I said I was sorry!”

To help ease the dispute, I went into decline the next turn and chose a new race. Francis shook his head. “If you win, it’ll be a soft win, Dan.”

“We can put an asterisk next to it in the record book.”

Karma caught up with me in the end. Even with my (unintended) cheating, I still only took second place. Francis gained a bunch of ground at the end with his ‘Hill Barbarians’ and Ken did plenty of damage with his ‘Pillaging Homunculi’ (although he regretted switching to ‘Imperial Giants’ for the last turn, a gamble which did not pay off, due to his own misreading of a special ability. He would have tied me had he stuck with the Homunculi.)

My ‘Bivouacking Dwarves,’ while amusing and jovial, couldn’t get the job done. Plus, I got screwed by a Tales and Legends rule change on the final turn. Tales and Legends is a Small World expansion which causes random rule changes each turn.²

As another saying goes, “Cheaters never prosper.”

True. But sometimes they take second.

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¹ Which means the sun set on the Holy Hogan Empire around 9:00 AM EST.

² Example: one turn we got to auction off the first player position, which I won, and it helped me considerably throughout the rest of the game). On my final turn, due to a new rule card, I couldn’t conquer swamps.