The Monsters
The Terrorist
Given a choice between scoring five points, or one point for themselves and making every opponent lose two, the Terrorist will always choose the latter, and as there is no logical reason for this behavior, we can only conclude that the Terrorist feeds on these negative energy blasts. At some point in the Terrorist’s gaming career, their victory wires were crossed, so that they either 1) truly believe that creating a one point deficit across the board compared to a five point deficit is better for them, or 2) are nourished not by a victory dance but by sinister chuckles.
The Tiptoe Terrorist
Like the terrorist, the Tiptoe Terrorist prefers attacking opponents to scoring points for themselves, but due to a greater timidity, will look for a weaker attack, or better yet, make a play that inconveniences their opponents more than sabotages them, such as blocking, or strategically depleting a resource to undermine an opponent’s following play.
Showboater
The showboater prefers the tactical to the strategic, and will sacrifice long term gains in order to score quick points. If the showboater has a choice between playing Physics Complex (2 VP / turn, potentially, and science resources are less vulnerable than animals and microbes) along with Pets (invulnerable animal VP), or placing a city, they will pick the latter, because it looks cooler to tile the board, and adds some theater to their turn. The showboater detests endgame scoring, and as they will pour all their energy into the visible VP track and game board scoring, eschewing any covert or postmortem VP opportunities, you can easily win against Showboater by dogging their tracks in terms of visible VP scoring and latching onto all the endgame opportunities that will swing the score in your favor.
Packrat
Because the packrat is a poor planner, they hoard things more accidentally than intentionally, such as the Splendor player who often has four green chips without a single bit of green on the tiers of available cards. Packrat wonders why they lose when they always have resources, when other players can see that the Packrat saved lugnuts when they should have been saving nuts.
Packdragon
Unlike the packrat, the packdragon is an intentional miser that sees hoarding as a way to cripple their opponents; said player in Splendor sees green everywhere on the available tiers, starts by saving two green, then adds a green to this fund every round, and never spends green if they can help it, so that the rest of the table has to make do without green for most of the game.
The Cheaters
The Cardsquatter
Cardsquatters are not only the most common monster in the tabletop bestiary, but it appears to be a kind of lycanthropy contracted by playing Settlers of Catan.
If you have ever sat on a portion of your resource cards to save them from the robber, you are unfortunately a victim of the Cardsquatter curse. That it is an irrational disease that attacks the wits can be seen in that Cardsquatting is rarely necessary behavior when there are four diverse projects upon which to spend your resources.
Cardsquatters are rarely seen outside of Settlers of Catan, so the best way to avoid them is to put different games on your table.
The Moneydiver
No matter how much space you allocate between the bank and The Moneydiver, they are adroit at making McDuck-worthy leaps into the coin stash.
Both the Moneydiver’s tendency towards impatience and their ability to bank-hover leads them to dash in 22 MCR for a 23 MCR tree. As The Moneydiver thinks that speed equals concealment, once you have spotted a Moneydiver, you can rest assured that any quick motions towards the bank are hustles one way or the other.
Moneydivers also like to lean back in their deck chair and forget to pay for things.
Stickyfingers
Like the Moneydiver, only with a Gollum-like tenacity, Stickyfingers makes gradual, tiny withdrawls throughout the game.
Stickyfingers also likes to exchange cards in play with cards in draft when they think no one’s paying attention. To Stickyfingers, all game materials are fair game at any time, making any game a very different beast.
When playing against Stickyfingers, due to Stickyfingers’s compulsive cheating, you only ever win playing Stickyfingers’s game. As the game on the table is so obscured by Stickyfingers’s deception, that game is never won or lost when Stickyfingers’s manipulations are in play. Settlers of Catan played with Stickyfingers becomes Stickyfingers Settlers of Catan at best, or, at worst, simply Stickyfingers.
While you don’t need a Ring of Power or Sting to defeat Stickyfingers, you do need a subtle mind capable of threading a way to victory through the many posers caused by adjusting your strategy to the ever-adjusting riddle of how to win against Stickyfingers. The temptation to cheat yourself should be resisted, as we know very well how hobbits can easily slide into gollumses with the temptation of an easy win.
Level Ten Stickyfingers, on the way back from a bathroom break, makes a withdrawal from a spare copy of the game, or another game with similar resources.
Cardswapper
The cardswapper seems harmless at first glance, and is difficult to detect, as their powers are activated by your trust. In any game where new cards are dealt, the Cardswapper sees the new cards not only as new point-scoring opportunities, but as a chance to rid themselves of uncompleteable and unplayable cards while you’re paying attention not to them, but to your own cards and your own strategies. Cardswappers are hence very common in games like Ticket to Ride, in which the Cardswapper wants not so much new routes to complete, but a screen by which he can pass back the two blocked routes he claimed earlier. Due to rising global requirements, Cardswappers are also common in Terraforming Mars. A variant of Cardswapper also likes to double dip in 7 Wonders by mingling the hand they’re passing with the hand they’re receiving, whenever you afford them the opportunity by taking a few extra moments to select a card.
Meeplemitt
The Meeplemitt can’t keep their hands off of the Meeples, or the wooden discs used on score tracks. When the Meeplemitt earns two points, they like to move the Meeple four spaces, or even more depending on how audacious their Meeplemittery. In endgame scoring, the Meeplemitt’s hands keep fidgeting and darting toward the markers, so that you’re wondering how a player moved from 36 to 50 with nine points of Milestones and Awards.
Co-Op Cardswapper
The Co-Op Cardswapper is an unusual two-headed beast that sees no problem in playing all games cooperatively. Usually a codependent couple, one of the heads in the Co-Op Cardswapper will pass points, coins, cards, or other point-scoring opportunities under the table to their spouse, which is the other head, once it becomes clear that there is no longer any way they can achieve victory by themselves, but might arbitrarily confer it on their spouse by a sneaky pooling of resources.
Co-Op Cardswappers are, suprisingly, the most troublesome Cheater on the list, for they have rationalized this behavior and feel unconflicted about it. “These are my points, cards, and coins to play, so why shouldn’t I pass them to my better half?” It never enters their minds, or at least never triggers an ethical response, that allowing one player access to the resources of two players not only puts the hard-fought victory into the lap of any player, no matter how poorly planned their strategy, making the time invested in the game meaningless (and makes the Co-Op Cardswappers feel or look really, really dumb if they still manage to get beat while giving themselves such a ridiculous advantage), but also distorts the game into something unrecognizable by the game designer.
Conclusion
If you recognize yourself in more than one Tabletop Monster, or feel yourself to be a different Monster depending on the game, this is normal, as gamers have a touch of lycanthropy and have learned to change their roles and adapt their strategies due to the fluidity that comes from playing so many games. So you can be a Showboater in Terraforming Mars and a Tiptoe Terrorist in Settlers of Catan and that is perfectly normal. Some games, like wildlife preserves, nuture different breeds of Tabletop Monsters, so that when a player says they prefer this or that game to another, what they’re really saying is that it is a prefrrable habitat for their preferred Monstrous behavior. Alternatively, a Terrorist may dislike a game like Munchkin, for instance, because said game is a habitat that brings out the Terrorist in everybody and reduces the value of Terrorist behaviors, as everyone is doing it.
However, if you recognize yourself in more than one Cheater, it may be your inferiority complex that you’re pushing around these games, not a Meeple. Despite their slightly more inocuous name, the cheaters are more destructive and parasitic than the Monsters. While the Monsters are killer strategists, the Cheaters are time parasites that see no problem in making a one, two or three hour game meaningless by adding or subtracting to the score as they see fit. Even if you win, playing games of any length with a cheater feels like time you will never get back. While defeating Monsters will make you a better player, defeating Cheaters results in a conflicted victory, as the cheating player was stealing resources and opportunities that your honest competitiors deserved. Even if you get a rush from knowing that your skill was able to surmount the point cushion stolen by a cheater, your win is undermined by the knowledge that things would have played out differently withiout the arbitrary advantages awarded to themselves by the cheater. (With cheaters that lurk until endgame scoring, the cheater devalues the efforts of all the players by levelling their game arbitrarily.)
Monsters are also only in-game behavioral sets, while Cheaters are real-world monsters, for cheating signifies bad character in the real world. They who are faithful in little are faithful in much, and someone who can’t be trusted to play a board game without cheating can’t be trusted.
Board of Life 