Push that lever

This past weekend I played a lot of 1v1 board games.  I won them all, and I won them all in the same way - pinning my opponent into a spot where I had leverage against him that forced him into terrible choices.  Both in Agricola and Castles of Mad King Ludwig you can put your opponent in nasty situations when they are short on the key resource of the game - food, or money, depending on which game you mean.

Squeezing an opponent on food is something that I learned a lot about at Farmageddon.  The players there are good enough that they can easily keep track of exactly how I am feeding myself and if I got too aggressive with my food plans they would happily punish me for it.  I got a much better sense of exactly how close you can get to the edge in playing there, and I used that sense to deliver some crushing blows over the past few days.

In all the games I won long before the final turns arrived.  In each case I spent early actions collecting food so that when crunch time came my opponent had to scramble to get food and I could rake in all the piles of resources.  Several times I grabbed piles of food I didn't need just to pin my opponent into having to take actions for 1 or 2 food and that let me rush out to enormous early leads.

Observers in the games seemed to feel I was being mean.  After all, why take stuff you don't need, just to make your opponent suffer?

Well, for one, winning isn't about having the highest possible score yourself.  It is about having the highest possible differential between your score and your opponent's.  Secondly, pinning someone into taking terrible plays gives you all kinds of great stuff.  In one game I won 29-58 because I kept my opponent off of wood for pretty much the entire game.  Every time 6 wood came up I managed to put him into a spot where he was starving and he couldn't take it, so I ended the game with 4 wooden rooms, 15 fences, and 4 fenced stables while he had no fences or stables at all.  My huge score was on the back of keeping my opponent unable to take the great stuff that came up, so my aggressive play ended up not being about spite, but rather about setting up big turns.

Sometimes you don't realize how much you have learned until you really get an opportunity to use it like this.  I have improved a lot at Agricola in particular, and playing against someone who is solid at the game and ruining him made me see how much better I have gotten over time.  That is harder to notice when you are playing against experts.

Of course afterwards we cracked out Crokinole, a Canadian dexterity game, and he blew me out five games in a row.  I guess that means I should stick to the games I know!