Board games - Can NTs and Aspies play well together?

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The reason I ask this is because I have had some situations were it ends in a verbal fight and/or we don't complete the game.

I discussed this with my wife, and her reasonning is this; She plays to have a good time with family/friends. I play to follow the rules and win.

To me it's a comforting thought to know there are set rules for a social activity, and I get frustrated when people don't follow the rules. For me, it's totally acceptable to ruin the chances of others to give me better chances of winning, it's a game after all, and according to the rules, the goal is to win.

I realize that others may take offence of me blocking them in the game for my own advantage, but isn't that part of the game? Should I lose on purpose to make others feel we had a good time? Have anyone else had these kind of problems while playing board games?

Also, we are talking about meeting a couple that might become shared friends(it's only her friends at the moment) to have a board game night with them. My worries are that I won't be able to play well with them. Anyone have some advice for me?

It looks to me like your wife wants to add some additional rules to the game, to make it more of a social rather than a competitive activity.

I'd look at as an additional handicap to give less gifted players a chance to win.

OTOH, at a conference I was offered a chance to play Scrabble on someone's Ipad--despite my unfamiliarity with the device, on the 2nd turn I made a bingo and 4 words--leaping out to an enormous lead. I then proceeded to grab all the power squares...

Perhaps thats how I should approach it then. Make me some social rules to follow that will override the core game rules and give less(I choose to use a different word) aggressive players a chance to win.
Scrabble is one of our problem areas actually, I choose to make words, and place them, based on the points I gain, and I also do my best to not open up for too many solutions for her, while she will make as long words as she possibly can, and preferably cover as much of the board as possible. We just have fundemental differences in how we approach a game.

Are my way of playing a board game typical of Aspergers?

I know what you mean. I remember playing trivial pursuit with friends in college, and it drove me up the wall when they would give hints to each other to guess the answers. Yes, I could have done it too, but I wouldn't because the integrity of the game was compromised. Looking back now, I was something of a spoilsport about the whole thing. Next time you play, don't think of it as, for example, Monopoly, but House Monopoly, which is similar to Monopoly except for certain places. You can't make them follow the rules, you can just take them as they are or refuse to play to retain the games integrity. And that would be pretty silly.

I have actually done this on occations for that exact reason, refused to play the game to the end because the whole point of the game were ruined when someone didn't follow the rules.

Seems like I need to make an attitude adjustment. Thanks for valuable advice!

Like you, I am inclined to play to win. I have a problem, though. Due to my mental processing issues, I am slower to process the moves and possible moves in a game, so it takes me longer to do my turns. This caused a big problem when I was growing up, and would play games with other kids. They would get impatient waiting for me to think things through, and take my turn. This led them to play around me. Naturally, this led to my accusing them of cheating, and then there would be fights. Back then, spectrum disorders were not recognized, so no one knew why I was different, so no one realized the problems I was having in processing info. I knew, to some extent, that I had this problem, but didn't know how to put it into words, so I couldn't tell anyone, and thus couldn't get any help in dealing with the problem.

I think you do need to add new personal rules, as you mentioned, in playing with others, that will allow a "handicap" for less aggressive players. I think the games will be more enjoyable as a social event that way. If playing with women, you need to factor that into it.

Now, do not pass go and do not collect $200! Have fun!

I also play to win, but I was raised in a very competitive household. I see board games as a fun application of strategy. It honestly hadn't occurred to me until this post that NTs have a different purpose.

How about playing games that require an all or nothing attitude? Like a Card game like magic the gathering? Or maybe scrabble because there is no way you can be accused of purposefully blocking somebody unless they explicitly said they were going to place somewhere and you take it. Even then, wouldn't it be cheating to tell another person not to place somewhere?

I also get very upset when people break rules, and even more when others are ok about it. I do play board games as a means to socialize, but it's no fun when people don't follow the rules, and certainly I don't let others win just because like this it's more social. Makes no sense to me. I wouldn't cheat for winning either, though.

I guess that modifying rules could be ok, though, if agreed upon before starting the game and for good reasons. I couldn't think of one, though. If there is too much disparity in the "ability" of the players, it would be better to play something else, IMO.

I don't think so, no. There's a lot of hypocrisy about it. You don't ask athletes to "do worse" to stop everyone else's feelings get hurt and prevent them from being sore losers. You don't ask musicians to "suck more" to make worse bands feel better at Battle of the Bands. It's a game with more than one player, thus it is competitive by nature. Can't expect us to accept it's okay for NT's to be better at some things, and one of the few competitive arenas we win in for us to sacrifice it not to hurt their feelings.

I live in a board-game playing household and when it's just my NT fiancee and I we do just fine. If there's a dispute in the rules or some certain situation isn't covered, we broach the subject as soon as possible and agree upon a rule that we will follow for the rest of the game/s.

I find that conflict-resolution gets a lot more difficult once others get involved and bring their own dysfunctional and/or contradictory viewpoints. My fiancee and I work as a team and respect each other a whole lot and agree about the importance of abiding by the rules, whereas that's not necessarily the norm when playing a board-game as a means for social interaction.

I've just accepted that board-game playing is going to be interpreted by most people as a form of social interaction which doesn't necessarily mean that the rules are going to be followed to a T. However, with the few people we play with that DO enjoy the strategy aspects, I find it very enjoyable.

One thing I absolutely hate is getting called a cheater. I would never ever cheat on purpose.

I really depends on the type of game and the crowd. There are mainly two types of board games: Social games and strategic games.

Social games are like Balderdash, Pictionary, Life, Apples to Apples, and well games that most NTs would go for. The ones that require more strategic thinking such as Risk, Axis and Allies, chess, and some less well known ones such as Vanished Planet, Yggdrasil, and Dominion are for your board game geeks. Aspies who love strategy and following the rules, especially if they love competition, they will tend to fit in a board game crowd very well because the board game geeks are eccentric enough. Again, it depends on the crowd in general, but I think that covers your main bases so to speak.

I'm glad someone spoke about pace. It's not something I thought of. But yeah, you need to be able to keep pace with the people you play with in a position that is not that difficult. If it's not a hard game to play, but you're taking unusually a long time, it will feel like a barrier to those you play unfortunately. If your pace for a game is unusually slow, you could actually volunteer to play in some retirement homes, and the elderly would just love the attention they are getting from you and probably wouldn't care about your pace of playing so much.

I love playing board games, but few people like to play with me because I win too often.

NTs are capable of both styles, its just a quesion of personality.

Two friends and I used to get together to play this tabletop wargame. We basically used the entire attic of their house (they were roommates) for it. It was this game. At the time, the publisher was just some operation from somebody's basement, and you bought a Xeroxed copy of the manual that came with a few pieces. It came with a page-sized map that you were supposed to go get blown up at a printer's, and the rest of the pieces you were supposed to cannibalize from a set of Axis and Allies (the board game). So, we went all out and got this enormous map printed and had a big piece of glass cut to put on top of it. We took some old window blinds and took the little plastic poles/sticks you use to rotate the blinds, and melted these half-circle plastic bits from a coffee holder to make hooks, set the thing up on a big table and used the sticks to push pieces around in the middle because you couldn't reach that far. Just like you see in wartime footage of air command HQs.

We had a coffee machine and a mini fridge up there, there was a couch and a TV (turns could be excruciatingly long) and we'd bring a console up when we played. It was crazy competitive, everybody played to win. Any strategic mistake was punished with zeal. Frequent debates about obscure points of the rules. We had a great time; I've had some contact with these friends on facebook and whenever we speak, someone always mentions when we used to play this, wistfully. I do not believe either of these people were aspies, and one at least most certainly was not.

Oh my god! I totally know what you mean. I have come to the conclusion that some people think about competitive games in a totally different way to me. It confuses me a lot when people say "I don't care about winning, I just want to have fun". The whole point is that you have fun by trying to win!

Yeah but sometimes that can be translated as: "I'm not a sore loser, I'll have fun whether I win or not"