Rules Lawyering

I'm the sort of person who believes there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. I order piles of cards in Dominion so every card in the pile faces the same direction. I tap my cards to a full 90 degrees. In Le Havre I make sure every token in the supply has the right side face up and are stacked up in neat piles. In short, I'm anal retentive. But I tend to feel bad about forcing other people to also follow along. I don't yell at people who return their Le Havre tiles upside-down, for example, but I do flip them over myself. Eventually people tend to follow along but if they never did I wouldn't complain. The game functions fine with the tiles in the supply in any orientation, I just have the need to have them the 'right' way. It extends to non-games, too. On the way home from work today I had to cross the street to get to the bus stop. There was a "Don't Walk" hand up with no cars coming and the light about to change. I could have started across during the yellow the other way, but I had to stand there and wait for the "Walk" guy to come up. Because it's the right thing to do.

But sometimes I'm playing a game with something more than fun and the desire to succeed on the line. I sometimes play in tournaments with reasonable prizes and sometimes the difference between 'right' and 'wrong' isn't just superficial but actually comes down to how the rules of the game work. Here my choices are basically between letting someone cheat for their own profit or being a rules lawyer and enforcing game state. I feel just as bad doing such things and in the past I often wavered and backed down. It takes more of a backbone than I want to have, generally, but I'm becoming more willing to do it. A couple examples from the weekend:


I was playing Thunderstone with Aidan and Pounder last night. (Thunderstone is a game very similar to Dominion in terms of building a deck of cards which you use to earn victory points which clog up your deck but it has a real theme instead of just being cards.) At one point Aidan played an effect which let him sacrifice one of his hero cards to get a higher level hero card. I was in charge of the destroyed pile so I took his old card and threw it away, assuming he would take the level 2 one. He thought I was going to give him the level 2 one and put it in his discard pile and it got overlooked that neither of us did it. A few turns later he noticed that he'd gone through his whole deck without drawing it and had made a plan based on eventually drawing it. (There was only 1 level 3 card left and he wanted to get it. I was also trying to get it, and in fact had bought an extra level 1 card to try to get the remaining level 2 one as well. You know, the one that should have been in his deck already.) How do you resolve this? If this was a tournament game with a big prize, how would you resolve it? Does a prize existing actually matter?

What we did was gave him the level 2 card he should have had but had him shuffle it into his deck instead of guaranteeing it in his next hand. This put which of us got the level 3 card up in the air but I didn't undo my level 1 purchase. It seemed like an ok compromise at the time but it isn't 'right' for either of us and if it was a tournament I don't think either of us would be happy. I don't know that the other players would be happy either.

Later in the game Pounder forgot to take a negative card and shuffled his deck without it and draw his new hand. Then he remembered the disease right afterwards and shuffled it into his existing deck. This meant he didn't have it in the current hand and in and of itself isn't that big a deal. However, he noticed this after I'd played a card that forced him to discard a hero card and give it to me; I was going to destroy it. His hand had his remaining level 0 hero in it. The odds of having his level 0 hero to protect his good ones goes down if he had a disease in his deck... More to the point, if he hadn't had the level 0 one and had had a level 3 one, would he have then wanted to reshuffle with the disease protecting his level 3 hero? Should a reshuffle happen immediately? Would it matter if it was a tournament game? How did Aidan feel knowing that I was going to get to destroy his best card while Pounder was 'cheating' to put forward a level 0 hero?  (I got to force both opponents to discard but only got to permanently kill 1 hero. Clearly I kill the level 3 over the level 0 but what if they both discarded a level 3? Aidan went from a potential 50% loss of his best card to a guaranteed 100%.)

What ended up happening was I got Pounder to confirm that he likely wouldn't ask to reshuffle if he'd be looking at losing his best card and then let him keep his current hand. In a tournament game I would have demanded he reshuffle immediately. In this case no actions had actually been taken based on his failure to take the disease (I was the next player) so other than taking a little time it was trivial to fix.


In another situation I actually played in a Magic tournament on Saturday. Going into the last round I was sitting at 3-2 as was my opponent. Lose and we get nothing. Win and we probably get nothing but might make the top 8 based on tie breakers. We have some good natured banter before the game (mostly about my moustache) and then get started. I have a ritual before every single Magic tournament game where I always pile shuffle my opponent to count and reorder their deck. (Not really randomize since it is deterministic, though I throw in a couple shuffles at the end to do a little randomizing too.)

At any rate, my opponent presented his deck, I pile shuffled and discovered he only had 35 cards. Turns out he left 5 of them in his pocket when he sat down and didn't bother to count his own deck. He found them and slyly suggested he just add them in to his deck and reshuffle. In actuality for presenting an illegal deck (too small) he's supposed to get a game loss. Should I let him shuffle the cards in or should I call the judge?

In the past I've let similar things slip without calling a judge because I'm a "nice guy", only to realize in retrospect that it wasn't an accident at all and they were actively trying to cheat. After all, what if this guy had left his 5 worst cards in his pocket on purpose? If he often gets to just shuffle them in when he gets caught and often gets to play with a smaller deck then why wouldn't he? In this case I called the judge. (They've changed the penalties since I last played; for all I knew he wasn't even going to get a game loss.)

The judge (Duncan) came over, and gave him a game loss. My opponent was livid. While the pre-game had been pretty cordial the games were full of tension. I wished him good luck at the start of game 2 as I always do and he responded that he hoped I lost. He was clearly pissed off that I had the gall to call a judge on his 'honest mistake', and I'm pretty sure it affected his play as well. The part that really saddens me though is he was asking earlier in the day about becoming a judge but didn't seem capable of handling having a judge actually get involved in a match. (I ended up winning the match and came 9th in the tournament on tiebreakers.)


On the one hand, it feels cheap to be trying to do anything I can 'outside' the game to win. On the other you'd have to be naive to believe everyone else operates under the same set of moral rules. If I always play the nice guy then I'm putting myself at a disadvantage compared to other competitors. (And I actually think part of why I never really made it on the PT when I played a lot of Magic is I wasn't cutthroat enough.) Not that I'm saying I should have cheated as I definitely wouldn't have done that, but that I should have been as anal as I could be in order to win. There's a Grand Prix coming up in a couple weeks, maybe I'll be able to be less nice there too.