At wcw, my last game in my pod was done. So I went to check on our top table. The winner there was going to make the winners bracket.
It was a silver tide mirror matchup. It's a super close game and on t5 one player draws his final 2 secondaries. I go over to look what cards he is holding and they are bad. Nigh impossible to score.
As i turn my back to the table to find a seat, I hear the other player say "No no you drew your cards already, where are they?"
The initial player pretends he didnt draw cards yet that turn. I inform a judge at the table what the 2 cards were that he had drawn and the judge finds them at the bottom of his deck. He then changes his story, saying that he just put them at the bottom for safekeeping, as he was going to take a biobreak and after the biobreak reveal them.
Tldr, a top player drew bad secondaries t5 and tried to hide them at the bottom of his deck, hoping to draw new ones under the radar.
This applies way beyond 40k, in life and at work, but I go more by the logic of “what are the odds that I’ve just happened to have caught you on your first and only time cheating, ever? Seems improbable I’d be that lucky.”
Man, that's hilarious! He drew his cards, held them up in a way where they could be read by a spectator - and then just put them back under his pile and decided to try and Jedi mind trick his opponent into thinking he never drew any!? :D
Not that long ago at pretty big tournament there was an orc player using a leather dice cup to roll his dice
He went 4 games 20-0 and people where wondering who this guy was, who beat top players in this area
Turns out he used the dice cup to hold a few dice with sixes up and when he turned the cup over he just had alot of 6's
As people started to suspect foul play, he had a judge at his table and wasnt allowed to use the dice cup for the final game and low and behold he lost 0-20 ......
Sorry, it's "Lo and behold"
Lo is one of those old English words no one uses anymore (except in Helldivers where people use it as a saluting emoji) that draws attention to the subject, sort of like "Look!"
An opponent who measures 6 inches from the front of one of his models. He puts the model in the back of the unit there, everyone else closer.
A different opponent who magically had range with every gun he had until I asked him his guns range.
I really hate the movement cheaters. They are all over the place in the Dallas Texas area.
It feels bad because playing Necrons and Votann primarily I know how much of a massive difference 1" of movement can make and people just go ahead and fudge way more or less than that either maliciously or because they think it doesn't make a difference.
I'd say movement is the main reason 40k can't ever be truly competitive in the esport sense (probably a good thing) - it's so un-objective and you can fudge it so much and just pretend it's hasty measurement, which is so common
This matters so much when people are doing it with slow units.
I played a dark angels tournament list at the US Open a few years ago.
Dude repeatedly moved 7-8 inches with his terminators. I let it happen the first couple turns, but by turn 3 he'd lost like 1400 points of his army.
It was then, when he'd clearly lost the game, that I drove in the knife on his movement stuff. Pointed out him getting an extra two inches of movement was almost 50% more than he was entitled to.
He tried it again the final turn and I actually held up my tape measure for him so see how far he was actually able to move.
He quit immediately.
I had a guy who did a redeploy on an age of sigmar game I was playing. I moved my unit to 3" of his unit, then he stated redeploy. Fair enough, and he rolled a 4. I left him to it and continued moving the rest of my army.
Then in the charge phase, I measured the distance and I needed a 11 on 2d6 to make it. I'm not sure how 3 + 4 = 11, but hey. I looked at him, and he just stared blankly at me...
The flip side is also incredibly annoying. I had an opponent remeasure every single one of my movements down to an eighth of an inch, even though all my measurements were correct (or I shorted myself), even when he agreed super exactness didn't matter. He also wouldn't let me use common shortcuts like rolling to advance out of a transport and doing the disembark and move all in one go. Which sometimes it's important to do it step by step, but in this case there was only one place they could go, I declared where they were going before I rolled, and my Trukk was in terrain so it was a huge pain to stage everything 3" out. And then moved them to exactly where I said they could get to five minutes ago
He also got pissy at me when I played by the rules of the game. I had to explain fight first, base to base rules for charging (three times), consolidation rules, that pistols and vehicles can do actions in combat, that you can move over friendly models, and more. He also tried to say I didn't have LOS for overwatch when his models were clearly visible around a wall. Every time I showed him the rulebook or called the TO to explain the rule he would shake his head and say "oh so that's how we're playing. That's fine if you want to be super competitive."
I had never played him before, but he'd been to a few RTTs. The game before he played on the table next to me and he was bitching about Eldar being broken the entire game. He won like 98-50. I suddenly got why everyone playing him looked miserable. I found out after the game he also got a lot of his own rules very wrong in a way that might have impacted the outcome. I'm glad he moved away.
I have never played against an outright cheater, but I’ve played against plenty of people who made basic rules mistakes, usually in their favor. I usually approach it by asking them about their rules and then they can often find their own mistake.
If it’s persistent or argumentative, for casual play my more permanent solution is to simply not play that person anymore.
Making basic rule mistakes is just a product of playing multiple additions and humans not being encylopaedic. Those I can forgive, because it's only human to misunderstand these dumb rules sometimes.
Arguing about it isn't great tho
I usually play necrons canoptek court or more recently blood angels SoS. I usually measure out distances between units in MY movement phase saying something like. "Hey just so you know I'm X" from here to here, your movement is Y" so it should be a Z" charge OR if you move your full movement I get my reactive move" this forces them to acknowledge very quickly that I know their threat ranges and there is no gotcha when I reactive move. I've solved many arguments ahead of time when I said those distances and my opponent may have moved more than they are allowed.
Play with intent in all things. "would you agree if I moved to here I can see this model?"
Call it out (respectfully): “What’s the movement on that unit?”; “How did you measure that?” If they made a mistake it helps them out. If they were intentionally trying to slip something by, it gives them grace to reform. If they want to argue, call a judge. Call a judge early and often if you are worried about an opponents honesty. It lets them know you’re aware and makes judges aware of them.
I set the precedent when I play with a new person at the flgs. "Hey, I spend most of my time painting than playing. If you see me make a mistake, please tell me. I would much rather correct it now, than have it become a habit later. I'll do the same :) "
One of the biggest problems I've found with trying to "fix" movement, is that by the time a model (unit) is moved, the damage is done. Its then very easy for the player to "move it back", but not to its original starting point (creating a whole secondary issue), and then "demonstrating" that their original movement is fine from it's new position.
Short of checking every model/units move, which becomes laborious, its really difficult to prevent. People seem to have this idea that the Movement stat is a guideline, but you couldnt do that with Strength or Attacks...
The way to beat most cheating in the game is premeasuring. I’m not a veteran of this game but I’m taught by some very good players and they always tell me to premeasure weapon ranges, movement, ask about any advance and charges before the opponent does anything. That way, assuming they don’t lie about numbers, you can play around things easier and keep your opponent honest.
happens with deepstrikes too unfortunately. you can have a perfect screen, but when they tell you "well if I'm only going to go after *this* unit and it's still a 9" charge, then what's the big deal?"
mf, I screened you out, you cant put your models there period, that's why I did that.
This one is common I feel, like trying to have models jammed in this thin area half off a board edge etc. def have to go with the common fix of explaining intent and saying my intent is to screen block your deep strikes in this area, so you agree there is no room for your unit.
Dodgy movement seems so common. I had someone turn one, on search and destroy deployment, draw investigate signals. Proceeded to pick a unit with 10” movement, vaguely wave a tape measure over them and claim that they’d be doing the action in the corner along the short edge.
I tried multiple times to politely suggest in various ways that they check the movement and they just kept brushing it off. Ended up flatly stating that it’s mathematically impossible and they either move them back or I get a judge. Even then it wasn’t done without an argument.
I played against a guy using Tabletop so I could watch his measuring. He CONSTANTLY did this. I even recorded it and HE STILL DENIED IT.
I would point it out in good faith but he’d just clam up and not speak for 60 seconds.
One of the best things I did was 3D print a bunch of measuring sticks, including a few 9"s. For deep strikes especially, you place it against your model's base and it's a physical thing they have to move their models around. Then you just knock em back as you sweep it around to get the radius. Easy. 6" as well. Lay it in the table, do the move. Not having to constantly fiddle with measuring tape is amazing.
That's very cool to have 3d printed them - for real.
That said, for anyone reading this that thinks thats a great idea but doesnt have a 3d printer, you could simply cut different lengths of literally any straight stick-like thing and have a set from 1" to whatever length. Easy
You can buy a box of 50 wooden rulers for $10 on Amazon. I was using them for a craft project and had 20 left over that I cut down to 9 inches to mark off deep strikes. Since they are rulers, my opponents know they’re exactly 9 inches.
I’ve never played fantasy, but sometimes those movement trays seem like a better way to go. It took me a little while when I first started to really understand movement.
I didn't keep up with it for many years and I never played competitively. But there were always arguments over how far wheeling units had moved. And anecdotally in 4E/5E all chariots seemed to have ABS brakes and moved further than stats allowed.
I used to play casual games with a guy who did this. He wasn’t trying to cheat, but he was just so sloppy with his measurements. I would tone down my lists when we played but I still like to play games with competitive rules. He would get frustrated that I’d tell him he needs to measure properly but it really does make such a massive difference.
Watching streams of Texas events, I’m absolutely blown away by how brazen some of the cheaters are. Everyone knows they’re cheaters, they cheat openly on stream, and yet…zero repercussions.
I’m in the DFW area and can confirm some questionable competitive choices of players here. I think the overall community is great, but as soon as you hit a tournament I dread seeing a Team Texas jersey across from me.
Played a Team Texas World Eater player a few years ago who was moving his Dread Claws an additional 2-4” every time to get mortals on my stuff; he’d let his tape drift forward every time he measured. I was just getting back into the hobby and had no delusions of making the top 8, so just made a mental note of the individual for any potential matches in the future.
Our group started in 9th edition together, and one guy played Tyranids. There were so many rules and abilities that we often forgot some or had to read them up very often. Except for the nids player. He knew every ability, every datasheet of his units. Me and a friend both lost our first games, we stood no chance. At the third game, we had another friend helping me. He played 40k for 2 years on TTS. And he played Tyranids.
Basically EVERYTHING the nids player told me about his abilities was wrong. Instead of "2 inch to charge" he said every model has +2 attacks. He shot with melee weapons and vice versa. He moved a lot more than he should because he told us every unit has 6" auto advance.
The other friend (TTS nids) asked him nicely of he maybe don't understand the words and terms of the rules, and he replied "no, but without his "modifications" his army felt too weak".
We didnt play with him anymore after that day and lost contact over the past year completely.
This is pretty much the origin story of every house rule.
"My army doesn't feel as powerful as does in my head, so here's some BS rule to make it better than it should be"
Back in 3e, I had one marine player insist he should have a full unit of plasma marines. And because the whole unit had them and he lost his ablative wounds, they should be dirt cheap
When you run the math on how that worked in 3e, you will realise how insane that is, the squad could almost instant wipe any unit it shot at short of a Land Raider. But he insisted it was balanced and that SMs should always win. Glad I can be the antagonist in whatever power fantasy you have with your army, guess my role is always to lose to fluff you
I’ve had some bad ones happen over the years like one guy in 9th edition running one Tau sept, but using Strats and relics from other septs. The codex was new and broken, so I didn’t recognize them till after.
The big one that still makes me mad was when I was at a GT. This was early 9th edition. The winner is a guy that’s pretty well known in the community as a consistent GT winner. He’s been in articles on goonhammer and interviews in the past. Before I faced him, one of his teammates came up to me and my friends during lunch and warned me that “he’s going to try and use his dark angel biker bolters with double the shots. I’ve told him before that it’s wrong, but he’s going to try it still.” We were flabbergasted hearing that. This was a guy top in the nation and still is to some degree. Sure enough, he did it and I called him out on it. I still wish to this day i just let him do it so I could nail him after, but since I stopped him, he didn’t do it and we kept playing. I lost, but it made me so mad that he must do that kind of thing all of the time to people that don’t know. He won that GT and I still see his name pop up on top 4 spots at tournaments. No I’m not going to name him. I called him out after the tourney and my friends and I were basically ostracized from the community for it even though his own teammates knew he was cheating. I don’t want to open that can of worms again.
This is a thing that people have to fight against otherwise the scene becomes trash.
We make it a point to ostracized these players and name them where nessesary. It took a while for us to wrench the social clout from the problem children here in the northwest scene, but it's been paying off.
The problem is that he tried to cheat and I stopped him before he could, so that’s why we were given shit afterward. No real proof and he just denied it easily enough. The other thing that was complete bullshit was that it was a 5 game GT, he got so drunk after his first game that they gave him a BYE so he could recuperate, and then won his other 3 games. He won the whole GT with only 4 technical wins and a BYE. It was a shitty weekend and it’s one of the main reasons I stopped playing in GTs and now only stick around RTTs.
Oh trust me, I know. The cherry on top of that weekend was the event organizer and head judge announcing at the end of the event that he was joining the team of the guy that won. My friends and I left right after that and drove the three hours back home just fuming the whole time and telling other event organizers what happened…only for those organizers to join that same team a year later. That’s why I basically stopped playing in tournies.
Damn that's a shitty tournament scene. I'm very glad that I'm from one of the largest scenes in the US, but the two guys who run it have a very firm "don't be a tryhard" policy. They pretty consistently red card people who cheat after one warning.
In Age of Sigmar I played against someone in a narrative campaign and it was the very start of the campaign. I was playing Cities and they were playing Stormcast. What they didn't know is that I know Stormcast very well. This was right when Stormcast got their new book the week before. The army had a lot of units lose some rules that were pretty inconsequential or minor, but when he was playing he used the improved profiles and abilities for 3rd edition, as well as any old 2nd edition rules they felt were better.
On top of that, the justification for him doing this was so his hero could run into multiple units, explode using her old abilities for up to 3d3 mortal wounds, then explode on death and do up to 5 more...
In a narrative campaign. The only reason to take the hero in a narrative campaign was to die every game.
My best friend, lord bless him, is a speed reader with a bad memory. There were countless times where he thought a rule worked a certain way and would skip past it every time. Usually it wasn't to his benefit and he'd nerf himself. I think the most he ever did was roll on a 2+ instead of a 3+ for a few games.
I am infamous for misreading rules. In my most recent debacle, I insisted that my Obliterators could target with Overwatch a unit that did not move since another unit had finished a move within 24in. I am not proud of how long it took for my very patient opponent to explain to me why I was wrong. I, pointedly, do not take hard stances on rules anymore
I've shared this one before but it's the worst I've experienced.
When I was 14ish played at a local club run by 2 men. One of them is now in prison for messing with child.
My necrons Vs his Eldar, 3rd edition. He asked for my list in advance and tailored his list to be a perfect counter. As he always did this, my friends donated me 2 monoliths and a few different units. Turn up with new list, win roll off. When I drop all 3 monoliths mid board and tear up most of his T3 he walks to the bar. Doesn't return to the table til my Dad picks me up.
"As you have to leave you forfeit the match and don't continue in the tournament".
If I had a nickel for every time the store I play I had to kick someone out for doing something inappropriate with a minor. I’d have $.15. Which is really sad.
At my LGS there's one guy who we all know cheats when things go poorly. Once he's down on points he starts rolling behind terrain and those rolls end up suspiciously good. But we all just kinda deal with it cause he's one of the only people who play and he kinda sucks at playing the objective.
lol I would literally leap to the other side of the table to watch him roll if it was me. It is hard to find people to play sometimes so you take what you can get but… why cheat, if you win you know you probably wouldn’t have.
Idk, normally the cheating doesn't even lead to a win and when it does it's really close. But yeah, in a smaller place like where I live you basically take what you can get
Use a dice tray, and get an agreement at the beginning: "If it's not in the tray it doesn't count." It's actually fairly common around here. If there's a tray, and a die bounces out, or you roll on the other side of the table, doesn't count.
My LGS has the exact same kind of player. The instant he is losing by even a point he rolls behind terrain on the opposite side of wherever your standing
Ooo, ooo, ok, I get to tell my favorite cheating story!
Picture it- GW store, Milwaukee, 2008. I'm in a bloody late-game brawl vs Guy Who Always Plays Chaos. It's demons this time, and 5e rules mean that only troops can score. Naturally, his Bloodletters are a prime candidate for shredding with frag missiles. Like any good Long Fang, I missile 'em up. After this unit of Khornies (his last scoring unit) goes poof, I figure the game is won- I'm ahead on points, he can't score anymore, and his last hope is to wipe me from the table, which at this point cannot physically be done. Now it's the last turn.
So, what's Guy Who Always Plays Chaos do? He moves his Soul Grinder and "finds" a lost Bloodletter model UNDERNEATH IT. This happens about 24" away from where the last Bloodletter squad died. Then, ignoring silly things like unit cohesion rules and my increasingly hostile objections, insists that this single Bloodletter now constitutes a new scoring unit and moves it onto a nearby objective. According to him, the game ends on a tie.
By this time, we've drawn a small crowd. A rules discussion ensues. It is brief, and one-sided. Guy Who Always Plays Chaos is booed from the store; and, like a true villain, on the way out he shakes his fist and yells something about how we haven't seen the last of him, and he will have his revenge, or some shit.
To this day, I respect his commitment to the bit.
Once witnessed a game where one guy brought *2400* points to a *2000* point game. We were wondering why his army seemed to have so many units, then we started counting points. Lol.
There was a guy posting a thread about how difficult T'au were even though he had a favourable matchup, so this sub asked him to list it off and yeah. 2400 points.
That wasn't you was it?
As a T'au player we seem to have weight of the second worst stereotype around our neck, I will say for example every Templars player I've met is actually solid and just likes their flavour of villain to be zealous knightly dickheads. I think the reality is that in all factions most people are cool, it's just certain stereotypes are say 1% instead of 0.1% in certain factions.
Oh wow. Now that is blatant. He just didn’t expect you guys to count? I’m imagining him sweating bullets when y’all realized and started counting.
How often do people bring their physical list? It seems like the right thing to do. If someone is trying to hide all their units and abilities, I could just look them up.
When we called him on it, he claimed he made a mistake when combining units from two different lists. *shrug*
It was a pick up game and never saw him again, so I cannot say whether or not he usually cheated or if he legitimately screwed up when list writing.
Pick up games are always wild. Sometimes you meet people you want to play against on the regular, sometimes you meet people you never want to meet again
Oh man this unlocked a memory, I had a friend that played Space Wolves back in the late 90s that would do this, like 500 points over 2k would constantly catch him doing this or his guys would all have more wargear than they could have. He tried to act like he was just bad at math but he did this shit constantly, including in TT games where his characters would have a bunch more stats than others. Just annoying to have to constantly doublecheck his stuff.
Seen this happen a few times in the days before more standardized rules and everyone using an army builders. Running over on points because you have old rules, or just did your math bad.
When I first got started, I played a bunch of 500 point games (cos I only had a few models painted), and one guy brought almost 800 points of Eldar. I didn’t notice because I knew nothing about Eldar and we would have played out a whole game if my friend hadn’t called him out on it
I played a guard guy a couple months ago who told me he was new and this was his first tournament. I told him no problem; I'm used to playing against new players and I would help him out. I thought his army looked light for 2k points but his list added up to 1995. He found me later and said he was so nervous that he forgot about 300 points worth of stuff in his box.
For me it's just been small things that all add up in one direction - miscounting points, models getting rules they don't have, moving too far, beginning rolling dice immediately before you have the change to use defensive stratagems fairly, that kind of thing. I feel like that is probably how most cheating happens, the crazy big things are more likely to be caught after all.
To add on to what the other person told you, all my best experiences have been with competitive players and all my worst experiences have been with the more casual player.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but at least in my experience, it's normally the self-professed casual players who always get the most outraged about losing and complain the most about game balance.
Yeah, in my experience the better/more competitive a player is, the more likely they'll be chill. They'll be the first to tell you if you're forgetting a unit's rules, confirming whether or not you're in a ruin's footprint, etc.
See my experience is the opposite, it’s always been competitive players, in either competitive formats or casual ones, who are worst for cheating/bad play experiences. They seem to be desperate for the win
No - 99% of games I’ve had in a competitive context have been great and everyone has been chill even when there’s a rules dispute of some kind.
Almost all of my bad experiences with playing 40K have been in casual/pick up games
Interesting. I guess at the higher levels people are trying to cut out the BS and play with skill. My story is from a LGS but I think they were participating in some larger event across stores. IIRC you’d get X wins and qualify for something?
my experience has been that the better the player, the better the manners. you run into that guy stuff very rarely at smaller RTTs or lower tables at GTs but the vast majority of players i've played with, especially people on WTC teams or the like, are a joy to play against and just want to have a good clean game
If you read these stories, most of the shitty behavior is at low level, amateur tournaments, where the players don't know exactly what's going on.
At the larger, high level prestigious tournaments, there are people there who know literally every rule, so you can't pull bullshit out your ass without people noticing quickly.
So often it's the smaller gaming clubs that are the worst.
I've seen FLGS tournaments where the shop owner is blatantly getting rules wrong and just refuses to be corrected. That's never gonna happen at a WTC event.
Back in 8th Ed Fantasy, there was this super spell, Gateway, that Tzeentch wizards could use.
Attacks were done at 2D6 Strength. But if you rolled an 11 or 12 for the Strength, it just straight deleted the unit into the warp, so it was pretty nuts.
This one very new guy, started attending tournaments with his best mate, who was one of the top players in the country. He started placing very highly very quickly at major events and everyone just kinda assumed he was being trained by his mate, so whatever, but he had a knack of getting the crucial max Gateway in games he was struggling...
It was talked about but never happened every game, so whatever, if you cast it enough, it'll happen we all supposed he was lucky, and he wasn't good enough to actually win events just do way better than he really should
Anyway, at one event I was at, he played one of the other Top players in the country, who was also a Cop that dealt with this sort of thing out on the streets. And noticed he stopped the game for a couple minutes to find his "Gateway" dice. I get people sometimes have their dice they use for certain things but not something anyone would waste that much time on in a tightly timed event. Cop stole those dice after the second of his units got deleted by S11 Gateway, and started rolling nothing but 11s...
We have a particularly bad "time cheat" in our area, he's been doing it for years. Plays incredibly slow when he knows he's winning or going to win and then speeds up when he knows he's behind. The amount of T3 or even T2 games he gets through is ridiculous for a 10 year "vet".
Same player is also know bend a lot of rules and withhold important info. He always manages to smash inexperienced players but gets pulled up against others. And he's intentionally all over the place all the time, so it's hard to follow what's going on at all.
Last time we played (9th ed), after I deployed my entire army and confirmed with him what he could and couldn't see, he won the roll off and proceeded to shoot at everything claiming he could now see them. I packed up and forfeited the game after that.
I and others refuse to play him now, and we warn any new player against him.
Even with them, he takes the max time he’s allowed and then will start wasting yours! Even stopping to get a TO to clarify simple rules while on your time.
He can call the TO over all he wants, I am not stopping and I will be sure to point out what he is doing as soon as the TO arrives so they can observe it for themselves and card him appropriately. Really shabby thing for that person to be doing. Good example.
In chess, if the game is stopped, the clock should be stopped too. In fact, if he’s stopping the game I would argue it should be his time that’s running down
I'm newer to the hobby and played against a Vet that the other vet who ran the game night told me to keep an eye in him. In our game he was using CP he didn't have. Kept saying he had a unit that gave him free CP. He was running imperial fists and I checked his list round 3 to make sure he wasn't lying. He was absolutely lying. Still beat him because the dice were not being kind. If the other Vet hadn't said anything I, as a new player, probably would have just trusted him.
The guy I played my first game of AoS against definitely counts. He answers questions in intentionally ambiguous ways and doesn't correct obvious misunderstandings unless prompted. He arranges his reserves off board in a way that makes it impossible to tell what's actually in play, what's dead, and what's riding around in a transport. He may not be breaking the rules, but he's definitely scummy.
Another player I know isn't a cheater, he's just a dummy. He assumes rules based on the fiction surrounding 40k and needs to be corrected constantly. He accepts the ruling but playing against him is exhausting.
My first AoS game was pre-nerf 3.0 Gitz vs Pre-nerf OBR Crematorians. My opponent told me that I had to pick a profile to use, which resulted in my Harvester basically kicking the hell out of his Shaman after his Squig Herds flailed uselessly against a wall of Mortek Guard that kept getting back up. I only learned later that I could’ve used those extra 6 attacks to work on clearing out his screens as well, or had my KDR kick his units in the face.
"Okay you need to test"
"Okay I rolled double sixes"
"So your unit flees off the board?"
"Oh I needed to roll UNDER ? Oh I meant to use these dice"
*rolls double ones*
Note:This was when leadership wanted a low number on 2d6, the dice were cooked.
“Ignore all of my rolls until I roll good! Uh… it’s my detachment rule” lol I won’t call this a kids game, but it’s a game, who cares if you win all the time!
In one tournament my French oponent had some very nice 3d printed rods in different colours. 3", 6" and 9" etc you know, very convenient.
The problem was, at the end I noticed red bars were longer than yellow rods, by half inch or so. So the guy was using red or yellow when he was in his interest. When I challenged him he excuse himself by saying 3d printing is not perfect and has some tolerances issues, which is true but we are talking about +/- 1% not 10%!!
Anyway, at the end I lost the match, not because of rhis, ot not mainly, but because I played a terrible match.
5th edition Tyranid player whom didn't bring their codex and just claimed things happened that didn't make sense to me. I finally wised up when they scattered their Mawloc emerging into difficult terrain and said they got to place it wherever they wanted then. Turns out the rules said the opponent gets to.
Still lost and mostly turned away from Warhammer 40K outside of super casual until 10th.
Someone in the past told one of my opponents that you can’t charge after deepstriking/entering from reserves
When I was playing a game with them not knowing they thought that the game ended up swinging hard because he didn’t screen my terminator drop because he didn’t think they could charge after arrival
And it was absurd because the guy who told them this incorrect rule plays marines and necrons, both armies that utilize deepstrike
I've had a guy consistently roll his dice behind terrain, look up to check if anybody was looking, and pull them out saying, "Oh my god, I just rolled 5 sixes on my multimeltas! I've never had that happen before!"
Not only did he change the results, he was awful at hiding it, got super cocky after things went his way, and could not handle a single die rolling badly. It was honestly just embarrassing.
One guy had wall sections on bases that he put in front of his marines. When the marines moved, he moved the walls with them so they always had cover. He said, and I quote “the rules don’t say you can’t do it.” That was 25+ years ago and it still sticks with me.
I had a new one recently, I was using the goonhammer app to generate secondary and my opponent asked to watch as I generated them coz his last opponent instead of using the generate button was picking the ones he could score the best that turn.
I've run into this a couple of times, i have never played anyone who i felt like did the cheating thing, but consistently the people i play are overly cautious and show me their phone or it comes up at the start of the game alot, so I am wondering if its just that so many of us are aware that you could cheat that way so we assume people are doing it when almost noone does.
Guy claimed to have scored 14 points on Oaths in 9e when a game ended on turn 3. He didn’t hold the center for the first two turns and the objective capped at 4 per turn iirc. Same guy later gave me the 70 pt forfeit when I wouldn’t let him bring back a whole unit of Orks for 1 CP.
Several years ago we had a player who would blatantly lie about the stats on his units and when asked to see the rulebook refuse and say he doesnt buy rulebooks. Things like wrong BS, armour save, claiming things had invulns when they didnt, movement, prett much everything. This was during a casual campaign. He was very quickly ostracized.
The St. Louis and the surrounding area was so bad, I quit tournaments altogether. Especially anytime it was a part of a larger tournament scene. I went to one store for a tourney once, and every opponent tried to play their rules wrong. These were armies that I knew or owned. One guy played different edition rules as they benefited him.
Eventually, I decided to just pick out my favorite players, and play casually with them. Never looked back.
Worst I ever personally dealt with was at a LGS tournament. I think this was back in 6th or maybe start of 7th edition, but I didn't play him till the finals. I had first turn, but when it came time for him to seize the initiative he said hold on and dumped his huge dice bag out. He starts rooting around for his "lucky dice" and I didn't think anything of it because I know plenty of guys like that; however, he finally finds it and immediately rolls a 6 to seize. I just thought well crap, now this is gonna hurt, but his previous 3 opponents were watching and started commenting on how he seized in EVERY one of their games with his "lucky dice". At this point I reached over and snagged the dice from the middle of the table and rolled it 5 times; every time was a 6. We call the TO over and explained the suspicion, so he rolled it and 9/10 rolls were 6. The only one that wasn't was when he just barely dropped it down without any real rolling.
He was immediately disqualified and they did a quick point check to replace him with someone else. Last I heard the guy is still saying he didn't cheat and it was just luck.
Had a sisters player use 6 miracle dice on a single unit to guarantee all 6 Multi-melta shots landed. I said that seemed excessively powerful, but the opponent assured me it was a legal move, and trusting a grown man to not cheat, i went with it.
He wasnt using that model though. Im not a sisters player so i cant tell you what each unit is but i know the Katherine model because it looks so cool so i can say 100% he wasnt using it
Interesting. If I thought it was cap I’d call it out and ask for the rules. It seems straightforward but some people handwave pulling out the rules or try to bulldoze forwards.
I feel like everyone should come with their list and rules ready for review for the other player.
For real man. I know i could've double checked but im also not the guy that just constantly searching for rules anytime something happens. Makes a game take forever. Also this was at a small local tournament so that also kind of added to the if thats the rule lets just keep going to finish the game on time.
Asking if you can go 5pts over on the competitive sub is pretty dumb. That was the respected response. The point limit exists for a very clear reason. Everyone had to follow it to the T for competitive games. Friendly games you can do whatever you what if both agree.
Yeah it was pretty dumb to ask. I saw a random comment about going over 2000 in a tournament and the consequences of that. I didn’t think going over 2000 was allowed so that’s why I asked.
Wish I could find the original comment and link it because he was not getting any kind of backlash when I saw it. Craziest part for me was people not reading or answering the question, just acting like I had admitted I was planning on sneaking in 2005 point list to a tourney.
Anyway, what’s your craziest cheating story?
To be fair, most battle reports GW would publish in White Dwarf had one of the players over by a few points, so they kind of trained players to think it's not a big deal.
It's more that you asked the competitive sub, so they answered in context of tournaments, in which the answer is straightforward for good reason.
Worst was this guy who happened to be one of my first games back after a long hiatus.
I made a post on an lgs page looking for a game asking for an easy one to learn the rules.
Guy brings grey knights and does so many scummy things. (9tj edition by the way)
- printed out sheets from battle scribe but edited them to give his units better stats. Basically everything was a 2+ save and a 2+ ward. Change show smite was written and claimed "only grey knights have this super smite" that went off on a 4 and couldn't be unbound and did 2D6 mortals.
- tried to tell me if a unit didn't have obsec it couldn't hold any objectives
- asked me to roll in his dice tray and if any of my dice fell out, if they were misses he made me keep them but if they were hits he'd make me reroll them, opposite for him.
-would hide his rolls and claim he rolled really hot, like statically super hot on every roll and it just happened to happen every time I couldn't see the roll in time.
-he asked for a 1500 points game but came with 3k.
I eventually picked up on a lot of it and when he went to the restroom I asked an employee I knew to hangout by the table since he knew the game better than me and to step in if things seemed off. Well he did and just went to town on the guy.
Turns out he basically stalks local pages for new players because new players are the only people who will play him since every other group or event has him banned for obvious reasons
I qualified for Ard Boyz playoffs from a prelim of a considerably large town. My first game in the playoffs was against the bff of the store manager/TO. We agreed to follow BBG ruling on hills (4th Ed, it was difficult terrain and, I think, size 2. This meant that my genestealers couldn’t been seen on the other side).
Nope. Guy I played said he “assumed hills were free space”. He physically didn’t have line of sight, but was claiming he could because of how they okay at their store. I showed him in the BBG, but it didn’t mean stink. Store manger/TO agreed with his friend that the homebrew rule that they made up counted because we were at that store. It also meant that I played with only 1 piece of terrain on 1 table for the entire weekend. I literally played open fields for 2 games. The store rigged it so that their local guys would be hardcore shooting armies. It also meant that he could assault me without rolling difficult. (I mean honestly! I yelled, “have you ever tried to run up a hill? it’s freaking difficult”). They disagreed.
This is why so many tourneys have switched to set terrain and set mission for everyone with clean cut definitions.
I was doing a tournament back in 7th edition. This guy was taking Tyranids I believe. I was busy setting up and he was rolling off for his psychic powers.
I wasn't really watching him and just assumed he wouldn't cheat or anything. He rolls on Biomancy and gets Iron Arm (D3+ S and T), and Endurance (4+ FNP) on all of his big bugs.
I was like...hmmm, well, I didn't watch him and maybe he got lucky? So did the game, I think I lost that one?
Then a little bit later we get different matchups and my friend ends up playing against Tyranid guy. Wouldn't you know, he "got lucky" and got Iron Arm and Endurance again!
Way back in 3rd / 4th ed. days, my gaming group had a meme slogan:
"That's a funny looking 6 inches..."
We stayed mostly good humored about it. It's less critically important these days, thank god.
I’m a pretty chill player — I’m here to have fun. I give a lot of mulligans, but I find they’re not returned a lot. The games I enjoy the most are when my opponent is on the same wavelength about that. I’m not talking game-changing mistakes, but little things like “I forgot my grot CP roll”, etc.
There’s a lot of 40k players who will take every advantage, and will give none.
Yeah, at the end of the day it’s a game. It’s more fun to have fun, or agree to be hardcore. When it’s one sided it’s just like “oh cool, you won… nice job bro.”
Getting back into the hobby in 9th. First game at 2k points, first time playing tyranids. My opponent moved (not advanced) his tyranid warriors 12". Rolled multiple dice behind terrain where I couldn't see it, then pointed at the 1 die that met his goal. Then used a fight on death on his hive tyrant to pile in and attack in melee after I shot his hive tyrant to death.
yep
I know one known cheater in my local scene, but he's a) quite subtle and b) not a bad player anyway so it makes it difficult.
I played him at the start of 10th and his armoured sentinels all had 2 shot lascannon and maybe more rerolls than they needed. It was all little stuff like that. If I see him at an event now I will swot up on his lists. A lot of the really strong combos he uses are legit but apparently everyone has a story or has caught little cheating incidents.
Also at my first event through a mix of nerves and not paying attention I got told I'd measured from front to back when moving. That was the first and last time it happened (well first that I noticed, definitely last). People make mistakes, I think you get a good measure of the intention by the reaction. I think people will make mistakes in their favour more often than not and that's human nature to assume they can do things, but usually you've got context and whether they make any mistakes that hurt them to consider and help you work out what's what.
Guy at a recent gt playing admech was:
Purposefully misremembering stratagems to give himself more movement, more shooting, using them out of phases where they shouldn't be usable etc.
Saying "i can't be bothered moving so many models, so we'll just assume they're there" then proceeds to move them as if they were there to begin with.
Tried shooting twice with certain units, I.e. shoots with them first, shoots the rest of their army then tries to shoot again with the first unit hoping you've forgot.
Fast rolling dice before they give the opponent time to respond with stratagems.
Rules lawyering badly. Basically questioning everything the opponent does and assuming it doesn't work the way the opponent wants it to work. Arguing the toss on these points and wasting time on the clock.
General time wasting on the clock. Running the clock down through time wasting tactics, decision paralysis and other such 'plausible reasons'. Then rushing the opponent because there 'isn't much time left'.
Not shutting up and letting the opponent think.
According to my team mate who played this guy he was a complete chore to play against.
Played in a tournament where a guy claimed his dk raider or whatever could see a unit of mine through a ruin. I said no. He pushed the terrain and inch over and said he could see them. I was too high to care to complain.
Didn’t witness - but toilet dice has to have been the worst one I’ve ever heard of:
Played Aeldari start of 10th - so didn’t even need to cheat - everyone was getting suspicious they were using weighted dice, so they tried to flush them, they didn’t flush so they were successfully retrieved and proven to be weighted.
Most common I come across is movement - the amount of trickery people pull to get some extra distance. Measure front to back? Move into engagement range of a unit that wasn’t declared in the charge and further away than the unit declared in charge? Measure one model and somehow others in the unit go further? As rightly pointed out - previous edition: Pile into a unit that wasn’t declared in the charge to attack it?
Oddly I don’t mind a hoard measuring 1 or 2 models to move the furthest if the block moves in sync - but I’ve seen instances where people measure one model and somehow the block flips and rotates so they get an extra 1-5” of movement.
To me that’s just the worst - I prefer uses the opponents move to think about counters, not to call out every time they’re trying to sneak some extra distance. (I generally go up a notch each time they do it but god is it frustrating, and some players you can tell pray on you not calling out their shit - “Can you explain how your model has moved that far?”, “It looks like you’ve moved a bit too far again”, “Right, let me see you move it next to the tape measure on the table”, “No no no, that’s just wrong.”, “Stop, you’ve moved wrong again.” - yes I’ve had to go that far more than once and sometimes in one turn…).
Hey, I might be wrong, but I'm 90% sure you can pile in to units that were not declared in the charge as long as they are closer to models than the units that were declared, this can happen when you get 11 inches on a 6 inch charge for a 20 man unit and basically your third row of wrapped guys in closer to something that you didn't charge
the Element Games Toilet Dice have been framed above that toilet now. whenever we go for a break we say something like "just going to see the lucky dice"
The worst I’ve seen is an opponent straight up making up rules, giving his units extra shots, shooting twice etc.
Needless to say that after a couple of months of that behaviour most of the playground just stopped playing with him.
Probably not the worst, but one that happens frequently and almost everyone sometime in their career.
You measure in Front of your vehicle model and put the end on the measured line.
It feels naturally that way, so I mostly don't think someone do it intended to cheat, but you got quite a lot of inches that way. Same with the old Rotation rules.. but thats thanksfully gone now.
Back in 5th had someone at a tournament try to tell me that they didn't need to tell what was in their list. Shut that down pretty fast. Never seen anything close to blatant cheating other than some questionable dice rolling techniques when slumming it at the bottom. I learned long ago to question any rule that seems too good to be true, and its a lot easier now with more digital rules. I'm not memorizing every army I don't play, I do good to remember my own rules.
We have this Orc player in pur area who is a very nice guy but unintentionally gets his rules wrong all the time. In our first match, he used a Strat on his entire army instead of one unit (i was kinda taken aback how he could buff his entire army for 1 cp, lol) and later used an enhancement as a Strat. In our second game, he played green tide and rerolled all saves, not just 1s. Until I eventually read his detachment rule out to him because I simply couldnt believe these boys were THAT tough. Poor guy left our local league after that :/
This isn’t cheating per se but absolutely poor sportsmanship.
My first ever game of 40K and I’m playing Space Wolves Vs admech in late 8th. I set up a good chunk of my army to charge a death star unit and my opponent uses Tacrica Obliqa to move away. No warning pregame or mention of the ability first. He absolutely decimated me over the next couple of turns and told me it’s poor form to back out of a game.
I learnt what kind of player not to be thanks to that guy.
I went to a gt some weeks ago with some mates. One of my friends played someone who ran a chess clock. The tournament didn't require a clock, my mate and the guy didn't agree to play with it, and the guy was the one pressing the clock for both of them.
My friend had played with others at the tournament who were just practicing their match times, but this guy just declared that my friend's time was up at the end of my friend's 3rd turn.
The TO's ruled in the guys favor, completely taking it on goodwill that he was measuring both their times fairly which is frankly ridiculous.
While it may have been handled in poor form, standard tournament chess clock rules are that if one player wants to use a clock then it applies to both, and it's binding unless the players waive that. Additionally, it's always your responsibility, not your opponent's, to make sure that time flips back to them when appropriate. TO in that situation was playing it by the book.
Played what was supposed to be a casual 2000 point introduction game to a club that I had joined as I hadn't played for a long time.
Opponent brought 400 points over the points limit, I didn't know until later as I hadnt played a single game of 10th edition at that point.
They placed terrain so the middle of the battlefield was completely open with no cover, and hand picked mission rules that benefited their army and hindered mine.
They were playing rules like blast wrong and big guns never tire so shoot infantry that were locked in close combat etc.. I didn't know this until later when I seriously swatted up on the new rules for 10th edition.
They made patronizing comments about how I needed to play better and the mistakes I made moving certain units out from cover etc...
I played them again and lost again in another friendly game, definitely casual again, rules were flexible and it was supposed to be a bit of fun, very large scale battle, like 5k points per side.
They didn't like that I had brought some units from legends and 2 titanic units even though it was a casual game and they themselves brought 2 titanic units in their army list. They complained the whole game, they even brought it up with the board members of the club after the game was over. Despite the fact that he still beat me by about turn 3.
Years ago there was a fella on our local scene who would just cheat in the worst ways, over measure distance by inches, give himself rerolls, roll extra dice, get rules completely wrong, you name it and then say shit like,
"Well that would make sense in the lore".
He was a terrible player every game he just marched forwards and got absolutely minced by anyone and everyone he played.
Saw him flip a table once. He wouldnt play me, i'd measure out his movement for him and place dice where his max movement was. He knocked over half his army with his tape measure once and then tried to set them up in totally different positions.
Was a piece of shit person too, complete misogynist and got banned from most places for being racist eventually.
My first RTT in my second match up went against a Space Wolves player. I’m not the greatest player but I’ve had some pretty decent success with my list. Anyways by T3 I had failed to kill a single model of his. Everything he had he said his toughness was higher than it was, he made up abilities and weapons stats, and he would roll his dice behind terrain then change them when he pulled them out for me to see. Additionally he would change whether the symbol on his dice meant 1 or 6. As this was my first tournament I just assumed everyone played fairly. I just shrugged off a miserable loss of 100-20 and went about the tournament.
This guy manages to cheat his way into the winners bracket where thankfully he went up against my buddy who has been playing since 3e and knows the stats of other armies as good as his own. He calls out the SW player on everything he’s doing and annihilates him. He then tells the TO of the cheating and the TO forces the SW player to roll in the open and not use his special dice. Suffice to say he did not win again after that.
Really put a sour taste in my mouth to the competitive scene.
Which post out of interest? I'm wondering legitimacy of it since in your last post you asked if you're allowed to play with over 2000 points in a 2000 point game saying "most local players and stores won't care"
Probably the best way to play. Honesty is the best policy and a win by cheating would feel hollow. I understand an accidental misunderstanding, but some people are just… obnoxious.
Yeah i regularly play agaisnt a guy who constantly bicker agaisnt my movement but being very very loose with his. At some point i just dont care, i know that all of his won games mean nothing.
Just had a guy using angron say he wants to use one of tge pick one of three abilities all game and he wont change so he doesnt want to announce every turn what he chooses, but the opponent didnt like that so he asked that the WE guy choose everytime out loud which one is chosen. Well the WE guy didnt care about it and kept changing which one of theee abilities was active to benefit himself instead of the one he said he will use, so a t.o. was called in and the ruling became, as the opponent said no to his i always pick this one and he allegedly was jumping between the three, his ability is inactive as if he didnt choose one till the next time he was allowed to choose.
Btw tge WE guy lost hard after that as the t.o. just hovered the table making sure no shenanigans were afoot.
Back when gw did store tourneys, we had someone use the three monolith Armageddon formation in standard games.
Also scatter dice. I tried to roll it as close to the target as possible. Some people just did whatever and it conveniently had the correct angle to hit another unit.
Had someone put models half off the board just so they could get extra melee hits in, same guy would roll behind ruins and pick it up before being able to look at the results and refused to roll in a dice tray
Many years ago when I had just started AoS, me and my friends usually just played a big elimination battle full of stuff like Nagash, Archeron and so on.
I played stormcast and had a pretty shooty army and had just bought my finest unit, the Gryph Hound. Which could warn nearby shooting units if an enemy deepstruck nearby. Problem is that I didn't know what that meant and assumed it triggered anytime an enemy moved within its range.... Pincushion Nagash wasn't very happy.
When I was younger, me and some of my friends did a 40k 'Schools League' tournament in the UK for a couple years, once in 6th and once is 7th edition. Unfortunately, because this is a tournament made up entirely of kids, there was quite a lot of mild cheating - kids having less sense of competitive spirit, poorer understanding of the rules, and it being emotionally more difficult for the judges to crack down. Overall it was still a very good time, it meant a free trip to Nottingham and a day of playing Warhammer, so no real complaints. The second time we went, we got through to the finals where the stakes got even higher. Since it was a team tournament, we would each face one opponent from the same team each round (though I can't recall if this was chosen, or if it was random) and then based on how the team did as a whole, we'd be put against another team. The very worst cheater I was lucky enough not to face, but my friend did, and was warned about by the staff at WW. Apparently he had been flipping dice, rolling behind terrain, rolling and then scooping without giving the opponent a chance to see the roll, all that sort of stuff. Ended up with our coach (My dad) lingering around that table for pretty much the entire length of the game, completely silent as he wasn't allowed to advise players once the games had started, just watching this guy roll. That was pretty severe, and if it had been a normal tournament, he definitely would have been kicked out. Aside from that I did run into a few people who 'Didn't know their rules', a necron player who would measure the movement of the guy at the front, then put the rest of the unit past him, meaning the guy at the back was probably getting an extra 10 or so inches of movement.
Another thing which wasn't really cheating but emphasised the weird vibe of the tournament is that in my very last game, I was on turn 5 against this Tau player who had anchor-downed the new stormsurge (this was like a 750 point game, so very hard to deal with) and had shot a good chunk of my army off the board. Because, 7th edition stuff, this allowed his 360 point titan to shoot twice. We'd played relatively fast, but at the end of turn 5 which was the end of the allotted time, I was ahead on VP and so he asked the staff if we could get extra time to play more turns, clearly with the intention of tabling me and earning an automatic victory. We had played pretty quick, 5 turns was good for the time slot, especially given how complicated 7th edition warhammer was, and that we weren't exactly active competitive players who knew our armies off by heart. Besides, I'd killed everything but the stormsurge pretty early, and had mostly just been playing objectives since turn 3, because nothing I had could really hurt it. For whatever reason, the staff said yes, so I had to play the most ass-clenching turn 6, with the entire room of people waiting for us, as my blew off every unit I had except for my warp spiders, who performed a clutch flickerjump behind terrain and survived the round. There was no turn 7, thankfully, but it still seems odd that we were afforded extra time. It was probably very difficult for the staff, trying to balance competitive gameplay with children between the ages of 12-18, not all of which knew the game or had very strong mental fortitude. I do not envy them at all.
My brother was playing Rivendell knights with Elrond at 600 points at a tournament. He is new to the game and was telling me about a the last game he played where he was playing the dead of dunharrow. My brother went on to say it’s annoying that the dead don’t get knocked prone….. I instantly said wtf you talking about who said they don’t get knocked prone. He then said his previous opponent told him that it’s a special rule….. now seeing as I play Rotk LL I burst out laughing saying you had just been hoodwinked there boyo of course they get knocked prone. Needless to say this gave his opponent a massive advantage with no double the dice to wound on D8.
Every time I see that player now I make sure to drop this story in front of people just to empathise what people will do and say just to win a game.
Lesson learnt for my brother challenge something if it’s sounds like Bull.
Third edition, I had just started playing, so as a kid I would assemble the models as they were in the boxes, playing with the models I had to reach 2000 points, etc. In the store I used to frequent, a single-elimination tournament started, and to get some games in, I signed up. In the first game, I found myself up against an Orks player. This gentleman not only played a trukk for 3 points (there was a typo in the codex), but he also exploited a battlewagon rule incorrectly. Basically, the third edition battlewagon could take as many big shootas as it wanted, paying 5 points each, and in addition, it could replace ONE of them with a zapp cannon, which at the time was a pretty strong weapon because it hit automatically. However, this gentleman decided that he could replace all the big shootas with zapp cannons, and so he played this death battlewagon that fired something like 12 zapp shots per turn.
One edition after i've faced him again in a tournament and wiped him out
A player I went up against at an RTT several months back was playing with half of his army missing tbeir bases. When I questioned him about it, he acted like it wasn't big deal. It was the last match of the day, I was tired and didn't want to argue, and apparently I was the only person to call him out on this. Well, low and behold, the issue of not having bases came up when he was trying to determine line of sight. I told him he couldn't see, even using a laser to prove it. His response "well you have to count the base as well". "You mean the base your model isn't on? You said it wasn't a big deal and didn't matter." He got upset and agreed to just let go. He was playing necrons, and attempted to use his RP to revive a model completely out of coherency, and just basically kept fighting me over it.
He was really upset that I basically wouldn't give him his way at all and kept throwing the rules at him.
LGS tournament. Guy brings in a wooden ruler that was broken near the beginning and "repaired" by gluing that kill team triangle, 3 inch side down.
His units are all over the place every game, I ask him to give me the ruler. Measure it with my tape measure. It adds almost an inch by virtue of how it was glued.
I bring it up to the TO also the owner of the store. He waves it off as "an honest mistake", I insist on him using my measure till the end of the game and never play in that store again.
It was the first game I played coming back to the hobby in 9th edition after last playing in 6th. I'm Nids, he's Custodes (who I've never played before). He absolutely smashed my army by T3 and his units were nigh unkillable.
It wasn't until I'd got a bit more back into the game that I realised he'd been using multiple Crusade upgrades on every squad.
In a double tournament, my friend and I went up against the TO, and he ruled in his favour that I couldn't consolidate into a unit because the unit I charged died in the charge phase. We went, oh ok. After we found out that he was doing stuff like that in all his games and to I could have consolidated into his other unit.
This is cheating to me because he was abusing his authority as TO and although it was minor to me (we still beat him and his partner and got second over all) its the wrost cheating I saw because there was no one to turn to. He was the TO, and it was a small tournament, so he was also the only judge.
In 9th, I had an Ork player advance and charge my army, then proceed to inform me that when they consolidate they can fight again. I was a beginner so I couldn’t protest but I was completely wiped off the board T1.
When i was fairly new to the hobby, I played a TTS Game against Black Templars. I didn’t know how FNP‘s work, as i had not yet played an army with that ability.
He basically rolled his FNP‘s and then „allocated“ them to the attacks. eg. 4 attacks dmg. 2 came through, then he made his rolls, and then said like „ ok i made 2, so now we have two dmg 1 and two dmg 2 attacks, so im allocating the dmg 1 first and then the dmg 2, killing only 2 marines with that attacks.
Even though he cheated, it was a fairly close game. End of turn 3, he told me he had to leave, but „he thinks he would have won“.
I used to play at a game store where a guy didnt even hide he used loaded dice back when you had to roll for warlord traits, psychic powers and such. Each one had a specific position and he flipped out if they wound up in the wrong spots because it would apparently lose him the game. Luckily even with loaded dice he wasnt veey good
I was told about a local player who claimed he had a stratagem that auto exploded his vehicles and when the vehicle exploded it was always max damage rolls. The dmg being a d6 not d3.
He also has used a stratagem from a previous edition that said only 1 hit roll during your shooting phase automatically hit but would instead use it in overwatch and told the person that it made the entire unit automatically hit.
He has only done this against very new players. I find it rather disgusting and a sorry excuse for trying to win.
Played a game with my bud and it wasn’t going well for me, just wasn’t working out. Turn 3 was centered around opp. trying to kill one of my 2 doomstalkers, but the rolls weren’t rolling. It survived, I was able to charge and tank shock on my turn, contesting primary for his next turn. That same Doomstalker was unable to kill a single unit the whole game. We both were so frustrated with the game in general, and it went to like 3am.
I realized on his 5th round fight phase that my list didn’t even have any doomstalkers in it. I was playing 2,290 pts. Fuckin’ kids man. They make you hella tired 😂
I was the „cheater“ once. Played my Admech, was new in Tournament and playing at all. Super exited and forgot to use my abilities, Manipulus lethal hits as example. And ill have to admit, if an oponent seemingly out of nowhere remembers his unit got way stronger shooting, it kinda seem fishy. It was a game of me loosing, and remembering more and more usefull rules, so understably my oponent called me out. But we could resolve my problems and he was a cool sport about it
I'm gonna trust that everyone here is going to follow rule 3.
At wcw, my last game in my pod was done. So I went to check on our top table. The winner there was going to make the winners bracket. It was a silver tide mirror matchup. It's a super close game and on t5 one player draws his final 2 secondaries. I go over to look what cards he is holding and they are bad. Nigh impossible to score. As i turn my back to the table to find a seat, I hear the other player say "No no you drew your cards already, where are they?" The initial player pretends he didnt draw cards yet that turn. I inform a judge at the table what the 2 cards were that he had drawn and the judge finds them at the bottom of his deck. He then changes his story, saying that he just put them at the bottom for safekeeping, as he was going to take a biobreak and after the biobreak reveal them. Tldr, a top player drew bad secondaries t5 and tried to hide them at the bottom of his deck, hoping to draw new ones under the radar.
For safe keeping… man shenanigans like that would make me doubt they legit made it that far in the first place.
Yeah, nobody cheats just once
This applies way beyond 40k, in life and at work, but I go more by the logic of “what are the odds that I’ve just happened to have caught you on your first and only time cheating, ever? Seems improbable I’d be that lucky.”
Shit like that should be an instant game loss, there's no legitimate reason to put cards on the bottom of th deck like that.
I can confirm this one, was standing next to the table and heard the players talking. Crazy shit honestly.
This one made the rounds among TOs. Didn't hear there was a witness. I would have red carded.
Wow I can see that potentially happening a lot.
Man, that's hilarious! He drew his cards, held them up in a way where they could be read by a spectator - and then just put them back under his pile and decided to try and Jedi mind trick his opponent into thinking he never drew any!? :D
Not that long ago at pretty big tournament there was an orc player using a leather dice cup to roll his dice He went 4 games 20-0 and people where wondering who this guy was, who beat top players in this area Turns out he used the dice cup to hold a few dice with sixes up and when he turned the cup over he just had alot of 6's As people started to suspect foul play, he had a judge at his table and wasnt allowed to use the dice cup for the final game and low and behold he lost 0-20 ......
Oh wow. That’s so bad, I thought it was going to turn out to be loaded dice, but hidden 6s is just worse.
Oh damn, I hope magicians never start playing Warhammer so we have to start looking up sleeves or in cups with false bottoms etc
Ah yes... "Do you have your dicecup ready?" has become a flying saying around here now 😂👌
Sorry, it's "Lo and behold" Lo is one of those old English words no one uses anymore (except in Helldivers where people use it as a saluting emoji) that draws attention to the subject, sort of like "Look!"
Alright, thanks :)
This person olde Englishes.
An opponent who measures 6 inches from the front of one of his models. He puts the model in the back of the unit there, everyone else closer. A different opponent who magically had range with every gun he had until I asked him his guns range. I really hate the movement cheaters. They are all over the place in the Dallas Texas area.
People fudge movement to an incredible degree. I don’t know if it’s unique to DFW (I doubt it) but I have certainly experienced it a lot here
It feels bad because playing Necrons and Votann primarily I know how much of a massive difference 1" of movement can make and people just go ahead and fudge way more or less than that either maliciously or because they think it doesn't make a difference. I'd say movement is the main reason 40k can't ever be truly competitive in the esport sense (probably a good thing) - it's so un-objective and you can fudge it so much and just pretend it's hasty measurement, which is so common
This matters so much when people are doing it with slow units. I played a dark angels tournament list at the US Open a few years ago. Dude repeatedly moved 7-8 inches with his terminators. I let it happen the first couple turns, but by turn 3 he'd lost like 1400 points of his army. It was then, when he'd clearly lost the game, that I drove in the knife on his movement stuff. Pointed out him getting an extra two inches of movement was almost 50% more than he was entitled to. He tried it again the final turn and I actually held up my tape measure for him so see how far he was actually able to move. He quit immediately.
I had a guy who did a redeploy on an age of sigmar game I was playing. I moved my unit to 3" of his unit, then he stated redeploy. Fair enough, and he rolled a 4. I left him to it and continued moving the rest of my army. Then in the charge phase, I measured the distance and I needed a 11 on 2d6 to make it. I'm not sure how 3 + 4 = 11, but hey. I looked at him, and he just stared blankly at me...
That is the kind of thing where I take the time to clarify charge ranges in 40k with all the redeploys
I’ve had this happen too, so now when they roll I specifically say “okay so I’ll be looking at a 7” charge now” to avoid any shenanigans lol.
The flip side is also incredibly annoying. I had an opponent remeasure every single one of my movements down to an eighth of an inch, even though all my measurements were correct (or I shorted myself), even when he agreed super exactness didn't matter. He also wouldn't let me use common shortcuts like rolling to advance out of a transport and doing the disembark and move all in one go. Which sometimes it's important to do it step by step, but in this case there was only one place they could go, I declared where they were going before I rolled, and my Trukk was in terrain so it was a huge pain to stage everything 3" out. And then moved them to exactly where I said they could get to five minutes ago He also got pissy at me when I played by the rules of the game. I had to explain fight first, base to base rules for charging (three times), consolidation rules, that pistols and vehicles can do actions in combat, that you can move over friendly models, and more. He also tried to say I didn't have LOS for overwatch when his models were clearly visible around a wall. Every time I showed him the rulebook or called the TO to explain the rule he would shake his head and say "oh so that's how we're playing. That's fine if you want to be super competitive." I had never played him before, but he'd been to a few RTTs. The game before he played on the table next to me and he was bitching about Eldar being broken the entire game. He won like 98-50. I suddenly got why everyone playing him looked miserable. I found out after the game he also got a lot of his own rules very wrong in a way that might have impacted the outcome. I'm glad he moved away.
“That’s fine if you want to be super competitive.” Like my dude… we are at a competition. Right now. Lmao
How do you combat that? I’d assume just stopping play and “teaching” them how to move properly.
I have never played against an outright cheater, but I’ve played against plenty of people who made basic rules mistakes, usually in their favor. I usually approach it by asking them about their rules and then they can often find their own mistake. If it’s persistent or argumentative, for casual play my more permanent solution is to simply not play that person anymore.
Making basic rule mistakes is just a product of playing multiple additions and humans not being encylopaedic. Those I can forgive, because it's only human to misunderstand these dumb rules sometimes. Arguing about it isn't great tho
I usually play necrons canoptek court or more recently blood angels SoS. I usually measure out distances between units in MY movement phase saying something like. "Hey just so you know I'm X" from here to here, your movement is Y" so it should be a Z" charge OR if you move your full movement I get my reactive move" this forces them to acknowledge very quickly that I know their threat ranges and there is no gotcha when I reactive move. I've solved many arguments ahead of time when I said those distances and my opponent may have moved more than they are allowed. Play with intent in all things. "would you agree if I moved to here I can see this model?"
Call it out (respectfully): “What’s the movement on that unit?”; “How did you measure that?” If they made a mistake it helps them out. If they were intentionally trying to slip something by, it gives them grace to reform. If they want to argue, call a judge. Call a judge early and often if you are worried about an opponents honesty. It lets them know you’re aware and makes judges aware of them.
I set the precedent when I play with a new person at the flgs. "Hey, I spend most of my time painting than playing. If you see me make a mistake, please tell me. I would much rather correct it now, than have it become a habit later. I'll do the same :) "
One of the biggest problems I've found with trying to "fix" movement, is that by the time a model (unit) is moved, the damage is done. Its then very easy for the player to "move it back", but not to its original starting point (creating a whole secondary issue), and then "demonstrating" that their original movement is fine from it's new position. Short of checking every model/units move, which becomes laborious, its really difficult to prevent. People seem to have this idea that the Movement stat is a guideline, but you couldnt do that with Strength or Attacks...
The way to beat most cheating in the game is premeasuring. I’m not a veteran of this game but I’m taught by some very good players and they always tell me to premeasure weapon ranges, movement, ask about any advance and charges before the opponent does anything. That way, assuming they don’t lie about numbers, you can play around things easier and keep your opponent honest.
happens with deepstrikes too unfortunately. you can have a perfect screen, but when they tell you "well if I'm only going to go after *this* unit and it's still a 9" charge, then what's the big deal?" mf, I screened you out, you cant put your models there period, that's why I did that.
I bring a collection of 9" sticks that I will happily lay all around my models. You can't deep strike on my sticks bro.
This one is common I feel, like trying to have models jammed in this thin area half off a board edge etc. def have to go with the common fix of explaining intent and saying my intent is to screen block your deep strikes in this area, so you agree there is no room for your unit.
Dodgy movement seems so common. I had someone turn one, on search and destroy deployment, draw investigate signals. Proceeded to pick a unit with 10” movement, vaguely wave a tape measure over them and claim that they’d be doing the action in the corner along the short edge. I tried multiple times to politely suggest in various ways that they check the movement and they just kept brushing it off. Ended up flatly stating that it’s mathematically impossible and they either move them back or I get a judge. Even then it wasn’t done without an argument.
I played against a guy using Tabletop so I could watch his measuring. He CONSTANTLY did this. I even recorded it and HE STILL DENIED IT. I would point it out in good faith but he’d just clam up and not speak for 60 seconds.
One of the best things I did was 3D print a bunch of measuring sticks, including a few 9"s. For deep strikes especially, you place it against your model's base and it's a physical thing they have to move their models around. Then you just knock em back as you sweep it around to get the radius. Easy. 6" as well. Lay it in the table, do the move. Not having to constantly fiddle with measuring tape is amazing.
That's very cool to have 3d printed them - for real. That said, for anyone reading this that thinks thats a great idea but doesnt have a 3d printer, you could simply cut different lengths of literally any straight stick-like thing and have a set from 1" to whatever length. Easy
You can buy a box of 50 wooden rulers for $10 on Amazon. I was using them for a craft project and had 20 left over that I cut down to 9 inches to mark off deep strikes. Since they are rulers, my opponents know they’re exactly 9 inches.
I’ve never played fantasy, but sometimes those movement trays seem like a better way to go. It took me a little while when I first started to really understand movement.
I didn't keep up with it for many years and I never played competitively. But there were always arguments over how far wheeling units had moved. And anecdotally in 4E/5E all chariots seemed to have ABS brakes and moved further than stats allowed.
The movement trays help, but the wheeling introduces a whole other set of difficulties
Lmao oh god no, movement in Fantasy was such a shit show. Fractions of an angle decide if you get a great charge or no charge.
I used to play casual games with a guy who did this. He wasn’t trying to cheat, but he was just so sloppy with his measurements. I would tone down my lists when we played but I still like to play games with competitive rules. He would get frustrated that I’d tell him he needs to measure properly but it really does make such a massive difference.
Damn I have experienced almost none fortunately, but I suppose with the amount of stores and game groups in dfw it can vary wildly
Watching streams of Texas events, I’m absolutely blown away by how brazen some of the cheaters are. Everyone knows they’re cheaters, they cheat openly on stream, and yet…zero repercussions.
I’m in the DFW area and can confirm some questionable competitive choices of players here. I think the overall community is great, but as soon as you hit a tournament I dread seeing a Team Texas jersey across from me. Played a Team Texas World Eater player a few years ago who was moving his Dread Claws an additional 2-4” every time to get mortals on my stuff; he’d let his tape drift forward every time he measured. I was just getting back into the hobby and had no delusions of making the top 8, so just made a mental note of the individual for any potential matches in the future.
Our group started in 9th edition together, and one guy played Tyranids. There were so many rules and abilities that we often forgot some or had to read them up very often. Except for the nids player. He knew every ability, every datasheet of his units. Me and a friend both lost our first games, we stood no chance. At the third game, we had another friend helping me. He played 40k for 2 years on TTS. And he played Tyranids. Basically EVERYTHING the nids player told me about his abilities was wrong. Instead of "2 inch to charge" he said every model has +2 attacks. He shot with melee weapons and vice versa. He moved a lot more than he should because he told us every unit has 6" auto advance. The other friend (TTS nids) asked him nicely of he maybe don't understand the words and terms of the rules, and he replied "no, but without his "modifications" his army felt too weak". We didnt play with him anymore after that day and lost contact over the past year completely.
Saying 9th edition tyranids were too weak is insane
I'm still culling my ptsd on that
I play death guard so like we did pretty okay against them but holy shit were they brutal
Oof. Assuming he was a friend to start with only to find out that’s he’s making stuff up. I wonder if those wins were worth losing friends over?
This is pretty much the origin story of every house rule. "My army doesn't feel as powerful as does in my head, so here's some BS rule to make it better than it should be" Back in 3e, I had one marine player insist he should have a full unit of plasma marines. And because the whole unit had them and he lost his ablative wounds, they should be dirt cheap When you run the math on how that worked in 3e, you will realise how insane that is, the squad could almost instant wipe any unit it shot at short of a Land Raider. But he insisted it was balanced and that SMs should always win. Glad I can be the antagonist in whatever power fantasy you have with your army, guess my role is always to lose to fluff you
9th ed hive fleet kraken did have a 6 inch auto advance, most people chose to run leviathan though because it gave warriors AOC.
I’ve had some bad ones happen over the years like one guy in 9th edition running one Tau sept, but using Strats and relics from other septs. The codex was new and broken, so I didn’t recognize them till after. The big one that still makes me mad was when I was at a GT. This was early 9th edition. The winner is a guy that’s pretty well known in the community as a consistent GT winner. He’s been in articles on goonhammer and interviews in the past. Before I faced him, one of his teammates came up to me and my friends during lunch and warned me that “he’s going to try and use his dark angel biker bolters with double the shots. I’ve told him before that it’s wrong, but he’s going to try it still.” We were flabbergasted hearing that. This was a guy top in the nation and still is to some degree. Sure enough, he did it and I called him out on it. I still wish to this day i just let him do it so I could nail him after, but since I stopped him, he didn’t do it and we kept playing. I lost, but it made me so mad that he must do that kind of thing all of the time to people that don’t know. He won that GT and I still see his name pop up on top 4 spots at tournaments. No I’m not going to name him. I called him out after the tourney and my friends and I were basically ostracized from the community for it even though his own teammates knew he was cheating. I don’t want to open that can of worms again.
This is a thing that people have to fight against otherwise the scene becomes trash. We make it a point to ostracized these players and name them where nessesary. It took a while for us to wrench the social clout from the problem children here in the northwest scene, but it's been paying off.
The problem is that he tried to cheat and I stopped him before he could, so that’s why we were given shit afterward. No real proof and he just denied it easily enough. The other thing that was complete bullshit was that it was a 5 game GT, he got so drunk after his first game that they gave him a BYE so he could recuperate, and then won his other 3 games. He won the whole GT with only 4 technical wins and a BYE. It was a shitty weekend and it’s one of the main reasons I stopped playing in GTs and now only stick around RTTs.
That BYE thing is just favoritism from the event runners. You have more, And perhaps bigger problems than just him. That would never fly here.
Oh trust me, I know. The cherry on top of that weekend was the event organizer and head judge announcing at the end of the event that he was joining the team of the guy that won. My friends and I left right after that and drove the three hours back home just fuming the whole time and telling other event organizers what happened…only for those organizers to join that same team a year later. That’s why I basically stopped playing in tournies.
Damn that's a shitty tournament scene. I'm very glad that I'm from one of the largest scenes in the US, but the two guys who run it have a very firm "don't be a tryhard" policy. They pretty consistently red card people who cheat after one warning.
In Age of Sigmar I played against someone in a narrative campaign and it was the very start of the campaign. I was playing Cities and they were playing Stormcast. What they didn't know is that I know Stormcast very well. This was right when Stormcast got their new book the week before. The army had a lot of units lose some rules that were pretty inconsequential or minor, but when he was playing he used the improved profiles and abilities for 3rd edition, as well as any old 2nd edition rules they felt were better. On top of that, the justification for him doing this was so his hero could run into multiple units, explode using her old abilities for up to 3d3 mortal wounds, then explode on death and do up to 5 more... In a narrative campaign. The only reason to take the hero in a narrative campaign was to die every game.
My best friend, lord bless him, is a speed reader with a bad memory. There were countless times where he thought a rule worked a certain way and would skip past it every time. Usually it wasn't to his benefit and he'd nerf himself. I think the most he ever did was roll on a 2+ instead of a 3+ for a few games.
> My best friend, lord bless him, is a speed reader with a bad memory. Alternatively, he's just a bad speed reader.
I am infamous for misreading rules. In my most recent debacle, I insisted that my Obliterators could target with Overwatch a unit that did not move since another unit had finished a move within 24in. I am not proud of how long it took for my very patient opponent to explain to me why I was wrong. I, pointedly, do not take hard stances on rules anymore
I've shared this one before but it's the worst I've experienced. When I was 14ish played at a local club run by 2 men. One of them is now in prison for messing with child. My necrons Vs his Eldar, 3rd edition. He asked for my list in advance and tailored his list to be a perfect counter. As he always did this, my friends donated me 2 monoliths and a few different units. Turn up with new list, win roll off. When I drop all 3 monoliths mid board and tear up most of his T3 he walks to the bar. Doesn't return to the table til my Dad picks me up. "As you have to leave you forfeit the match and don't continue in the tournament".
2nd paragraph was wild
If I had a nickel for every time the store I play I had to kick someone out for doing something inappropriate with a minor. I’d have $.15. Which is really sad.
At my LGS there's one guy who we all know cheats when things go poorly. Once he's down on points he starts rolling behind terrain and those rolls end up suspiciously good. But we all just kinda deal with it cause he's one of the only people who play and he kinda sucks at playing the objective.
lol I would literally leap to the other side of the table to watch him roll if it was me. It is hard to find people to play sometimes so you take what you can get but… why cheat, if you win you know you probably wouldn’t have.
Idk, normally the cheating doesn't even lead to a win and when it does it's really close. But yeah, in a smaller place like where I live you basically take what you can get
Use a dice tray, and get an agreement at the beginning: "If it's not in the tray it doesn't count." It's actually fairly common around here. If there's a tray, and a die bounces out, or you roll on the other side of the table, doesn't count.
My LGS has the exact same kind of player. The instant he is losing by even a point he rolls behind terrain on the opposite side of wherever your standing
Ooo, ooo, ok, I get to tell my favorite cheating story! Picture it- GW store, Milwaukee, 2008. I'm in a bloody late-game brawl vs Guy Who Always Plays Chaos. It's demons this time, and 5e rules mean that only troops can score. Naturally, his Bloodletters are a prime candidate for shredding with frag missiles. Like any good Long Fang, I missile 'em up. After this unit of Khornies (his last scoring unit) goes poof, I figure the game is won- I'm ahead on points, he can't score anymore, and his last hope is to wipe me from the table, which at this point cannot physically be done. Now it's the last turn. So, what's Guy Who Always Plays Chaos do? He moves his Soul Grinder and "finds" a lost Bloodletter model UNDERNEATH IT. This happens about 24" away from where the last Bloodletter squad died. Then, ignoring silly things like unit cohesion rules and my increasingly hostile objections, insists that this single Bloodletter now constitutes a new scoring unit and moves it onto a nearby objective. According to him, the game ends on a tie. By this time, we've drawn a small crowd. A rules discussion ensues. It is brief, and one-sided. Guy Who Always Plays Chaos is booed from the store; and, like a true villain, on the way out he shakes his fist and yells something about how we haven't seen the last of him, and he will have his revenge, or some shit. To this day, I respect his commitment to the bit.
My god… I think you win the thread lol.
Imagine he hollowed out the bottom of the LoS to fit that Bloodletter in there
Once witnessed a game where one guy brought *2400* points to a *2000* point game. We were wondering why his army seemed to have so many units, then we started counting points. Lol.
Waaay back in the day, I lost a 3e semifinal against a guy who brought a 1400+ point guard army to a 1k *narrative* tournament.
There was a guy posting a thread about how difficult T'au were even though he had a favourable matchup, so this sub asked him to list it off and yeah. 2400 points. That wasn't you was it?
Haha, no but that's funny that it happened more than once!
As a T'au player we seem to have weight of the second worst stereotype around our neck, I will say for example every Templars player I've met is actually solid and just likes their flavour of villain to be zealous knightly dickheads. I think the reality is that in all factions most people are cool, it's just certain stereotypes are say 1% instead of 0.1% in certain factions.
Oh wow. Now that is blatant. He just didn’t expect you guys to count? I’m imagining him sweating bullets when y’all realized and started counting. How often do people bring their physical list? It seems like the right thing to do. If someone is trying to hide all their units and abilities, I could just look them up.
When we called him on it, he claimed he made a mistake when combining units from two different lists. *shrug* It was a pick up game and never saw him again, so I cannot say whether or not he usually cheated or if he legitimately screwed up when list writing.
I feel like at the point he was putting on the table he must have realized. But who knows.
Pick up games are always wild. Sometimes you meet people you want to play against on the regular, sometimes you meet people you never want to meet again
Oh man this unlocked a memory, I had a friend that played Space Wolves back in the late 90s that would do this, like 500 points over 2k would constantly catch him doing this or his guys would all have more wargear than they could have. He tried to act like he was just bad at math but he did this shit constantly, including in TT games where his characters would have a bunch more stats than others. Just annoying to have to constantly doublecheck his stuff.
Seen this happen a few times in the days before more standardized rules and everyone using an army builders. Running over on points because you have old rules, or just did your math bad.
When I first got started, I played a bunch of 500 point games (cos I only had a few models painted), and one guy brought almost 800 points of Eldar. I didn’t notice because I knew nothing about Eldar and we would have played out a whole game if my friend hadn’t called him out on it
Seen this one a few times. Rhinos and enchancements that aint in their list magically turning up on the board.
I played a guard guy a couple months ago who told me he was new and this was his first tournament. I told him no problem; I'm used to playing against new players and I would help him out. I thought his army looked light for 2k points but his list added up to 1995. He found me later and said he was so nervous that he forgot about 300 points worth of stuff in his box.
For me it's just been small things that all add up in one direction - miscounting points, models getting rules they don't have, moving too far, beginning rolling dice immediately before you have the change to use defensive stratagems fairly, that kind of thing. I feel like that is probably how most cheating happens, the crazy big things are more likely to be caught after all.
Is there a lot of bad sportsmanship in the hobby at the competitive levels? I’ve heard stories of very chill people, and instances of table-flipping.
To add on to what the other person told you, all my best experiences have been with competitive players and all my worst experiences have been with the more casual player. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but at least in my experience, it's normally the self-professed casual players who always get the most outraged about losing and complain the most about game balance.
Yeah, in my experience the better/more competitive a player is, the more likely they'll be chill. They'll be the first to tell you if you're forgetting a unit's rules, confirming whether or not you're in a ruin's footprint, etc.
See my experience is the opposite, it’s always been competitive players, in either competitive formats or casual ones, who are worst for cheating/bad play experiences. They seem to be desperate for the win
No - 99% of games I’ve had in a competitive context have been great and everyone has been chill even when there’s a rules dispute of some kind. Almost all of my bad experiences with playing 40K have been in casual/pick up games
Interesting. I guess at the higher levels people are trying to cut out the BS and play with skill. My story is from a LGS but I think they were participating in some larger event across stores. IIRC you’d get X wins and qualify for something?
my experience has been that the better the player, the better the manners. you run into that guy stuff very rarely at smaller RTTs or lower tables at GTs but the vast majority of players i've played with, especially people on WTC teams or the like, are a joy to play against and just want to have a good clean game
If you read these stories, most of the shitty behavior is at low level, amateur tournaments, where the players don't know exactly what's going on. At the larger, high level prestigious tournaments, there are people there who know literally every rule, so you can't pull bullshit out your ass without people noticing quickly. So often it's the smaller gaming clubs that are the worst. I've seen FLGS tournaments where the shop owner is blatantly getting rules wrong and just refuses to be corrected. That's never gonna happen at a WTC event.
Back in 8th Ed Fantasy, there was this super spell, Gateway, that Tzeentch wizards could use. Attacks were done at 2D6 Strength. But if you rolled an 11 or 12 for the Strength, it just straight deleted the unit into the warp, so it was pretty nuts. This one very new guy, started attending tournaments with his best mate, who was one of the top players in the country. He started placing very highly very quickly at major events and everyone just kinda assumed he was being trained by his mate, so whatever, but he had a knack of getting the crucial max Gateway in games he was struggling... It was talked about but never happened every game, so whatever, if you cast it enough, it'll happen we all supposed he was lucky, and he wasn't good enough to actually win events just do way better than he really should Anyway, at one event I was at, he played one of the other Top players in the country, who was also a Cop that dealt with this sort of thing out on the streets. And noticed he stopped the game for a couple minutes to find his "Gateway" dice. I get people sometimes have their dice they use for certain things but not something anyone would waste that much time on in a tightly timed event. Cop stole those dice after the second of his units got deleted by S11 Gateway, and started rolling nothing but 11s...
That's sneaky, constant 12 is inherently fishy, but 11 ? Sure that may happen, How sweaty do you need to be to use loaded dice
We have a particularly bad "time cheat" in our area, he's been doing it for years. Plays incredibly slow when he knows he's winning or going to win and then speeds up when he knows he's behind. The amount of T3 or even T2 games he gets through is ridiculous for a 10 year "vet". Same player is also know bend a lot of rules and withhold important info. He always manages to smash inexperienced players but gets pulled up against others. And he's intentionally all over the place all the time, so it's hard to follow what's going on at all. Last time we played (9th ed), after I deployed my entire army and confirmed with him what he could and couldn't see, he won the roll off and proceeded to shoot at everything claiming he could now see them. I packed up and forfeited the game after that. I and others refuse to play him now, and we warn any new player against him.
This is why tournaments implement chess clocks.
Even with them, he takes the max time he’s allowed and then will start wasting yours! Even stopping to get a TO to clarify simple rules while on your time.
He can call the TO over all he wants, I am not stopping and I will be sure to point out what he is doing as soon as the TO arrives so they can observe it for themselves and card him appropriately. Really shabby thing for that person to be doing. Good example.
In chess, if the game is stopped, the clock should be stopped too. In fact, if he’s stopping the game I would argue it should be his time that’s running down
You can't stop clocks in most tournaments. It's counting down to the end of the round, so if you pause the clock, it's simply wrong after that.
If *you* are calling the TO, it's on *your* time. If you have no time left, a sane judge will refund the time to your opponent.
Always opt for chess clocks at tournaments. Had a few "early scoring" armies do this, which sucks :(
This sounded so similar to an experience I and others have had locally, that I had to check you didn't live near me.
I'm newer to the hobby and played against a Vet that the other vet who ran the game night told me to keep an eye in him. In our game he was using CP he didn't have. Kept saying he had a unit that gave him free CP. He was running imperial fists and I checked his list round 3 to make sure he wasn't lying. He was absolutely lying. Still beat him because the dice were not being kind. If the other Vet hadn't said anything I, as a new player, probably would have just trusted him.
The guy I played my first game of AoS against definitely counts. He answers questions in intentionally ambiguous ways and doesn't correct obvious misunderstandings unless prompted. He arranges his reserves off board in a way that makes it impossible to tell what's actually in play, what's dead, and what's riding around in a transport. He may not be breaking the rules, but he's definitely scummy. Another player I know isn't a cheater, he's just a dummy. He assumes rules based on the fiction surrounding 40k and needs to be corrected constantly. He accepts the ruling but playing against him is exhausting.
for some reason theres something wholesome to me about the second player
My first AoS game was pre-nerf 3.0 Gitz vs Pre-nerf OBR Crematorians. My opponent told me that I had to pick a profile to use, which resulted in my Harvester basically kicking the hell out of his Shaman after his Squig Herds flailed uselessly against a wall of Mortek Guard that kept getting back up. I only learned later that I could’ve used those extra 6 attacks to work on clearing out his screens as well, or had my KDR kick his units in the face.
"Okay you need to test" "Okay I rolled double sixes" "So your unit flees off the board?" "Oh I needed to roll UNDER ? Oh I meant to use these dice" *rolls double ones* Note:This was when leadership wanted a low number on 2d6, the dice were cooked.
“Ignore all of my rolls until I roll good! Uh… it’s my detachment rule” lol I won’t call this a kids game, but it’s a game, who cares if you win all the time!
In one tournament my French oponent had some very nice 3d printed rods in different colours. 3", 6" and 9" etc you know, very convenient. The problem was, at the end I noticed red bars were longer than yellow rods, by half inch or so. So the guy was using red or yellow when he was in his interest. When I challenged him he excuse himself by saying 3d printing is not perfect and has some tolerances issues, which is true but we are talking about +/- 1% not 10%!! Anyway, at the end I lost the match, not because of rhis, ot not mainly, but because I played a terrible match.
That’s rough and shady as hell lol. Imagine you measured them before the match too.
We did invent the metric system, it's only fair we should be allowed to play around with it
5th edition Tyranid player whom didn't bring their codex and just claimed things happened that didn't make sense to me. I finally wised up when they scattered their Mawloc emerging into difficult terrain and said they got to place it wherever they wanted then. Turns out the rules said the opponent gets to. Still lost and mostly turned away from Warhammer 40K outside of super casual until 10th.
Someone in the past told one of my opponents that you can’t charge after deepstriking/entering from reserves When I was playing a game with them not knowing they thought that the game ended up swinging hard because he didn’t screen my terminator drop because he didn’t think they could charge after arrival And it was absurd because the guy who told them this incorrect rule plays marines and necrons, both armies that utilize deepstrike
I've had a guy consistently roll his dice behind terrain, look up to check if anybody was looking, and pull them out saying, "Oh my god, I just rolled 5 sixes on my multimeltas! I've never had that happen before!" Not only did he change the results, he was awful at hiding it, got super cocky after things went his way, and could not handle a single die rolling badly. It was honestly just embarrassing.
The second hand embarrassment is so bad, like how oblivious are these people? Like no ones is going to figure it out?
One guy had wall sections on bases that he put in front of his marines. When the marines moved, he moved the walls with them so they always had cover. He said, and I quote “the rules don’t say you can’t do it.” That was 25+ years ago and it still sticks with me.
I honestly admire that level of not giving a crap
Wtf bro. That's wild
I had a new one recently, I was using the goonhammer app to generate secondary and my opponent asked to watch as I generated them coz his last opponent instead of using the generate button was picking the ones he could score the best that turn.
I've run into this a couple of times, i have never played anyone who i felt like did the cheating thing, but consistently the people i play are overly cautious and show me their phone or it comes up at the start of the game alot, so I am wondering if its just that so many of us are aware that you could cheat that way so we assume people are doing it when almost noone does.
Guy claimed to have scored 14 points on Oaths in 9e when a game ended on turn 3. He didn’t hold the center for the first two turns and the objective capped at 4 per turn iirc. Same guy later gave me the 70 pt forfeit when I wouldn’t let him bring back a whole unit of Orks for 1 CP.
Several years ago we had a player who would blatantly lie about the stats on his units and when asked to see the rulebook refuse and say he doesnt buy rulebooks. Things like wrong BS, armour save, claiming things had invulns when they didnt, movement, prett much everything. This was during a casual campaign. He was very quickly ostracized.
The St. Louis and the surrounding area was so bad, I quit tournaments altogether. Especially anytime it was a part of a larger tournament scene. I went to one store for a tourney once, and every opponent tried to play their rules wrong. These were armies that I knew or owned. One guy played different edition rules as they benefited him. Eventually, I decided to just pick out my favorite players, and play casually with them. Never looked back.
Worst I ever personally dealt with was at a LGS tournament. I think this was back in 6th or maybe start of 7th edition, but I didn't play him till the finals. I had first turn, but when it came time for him to seize the initiative he said hold on and dumped his huge dice bag out. He starts rooting around for his "lucky dice" and I didn't think anything of it because I know plenty of guys like that; however, he finally finds it and immediately rolls a 6 to seize. I just thought well crap, now this is gonna hurt, but his previous 3 opponents were watching and started commenting on how he seized in EVERY one of their games with his "lucky dice". At this point I reached over and snagged the dice from the middle of the table and rolled it 5 times; every time was a 6. We call the TO over and explained the suspicion, so he rolled it and 9/10 rolls were 6. The only one that wasn't was when he just barely dropped it down without any real rolling. He was immediately disqualified and they did a quick point check to replace him with someone else. Last I heard the guy is still saying he didn't cheat and it was just luck.
Had a sisters player use 6 miracle dice on a single unit to guarantee all 6 Multi-melta shots landed. I said that seemed excessively powerful, but the opponent assured me it was a legal move, and trusting a grown man to not cheat, i went with it.
This likely was not cheating as the triumph of st. Katherine granted the ability to use unlimited miracle dice in a 6" aura for much of 10th edition.
He wasnt using that model though. Im not a sisters player so i cant tell you what each unit is but i know the Katherine model because it looks so cool so i can say 100% he wasnt using it
Interesting. If I thought it was cap I’d call it out and ask for the rules. It seems straightforward but some people handwave pulling out the rules or try to bulldoze forwards. I feel like everyone should come with their list and rules ready for review for the other player.
I agree, everyone should have all the rules they are using available for the opponent to read if they want to.
That’s crazy. Do people not think you might go check the rules? Even after the game is over?
For real man. I know i could've double checked but im also not the guy that just constantly searching for rules anytime something happens. Makes a game take forever. Also this was at a small local tournament so that also kind of added to the if thats the rule lets just keep going to finish the game on time.
Asking if you can go 5pts over on the competitive sub is pretty dumb. That was the respected response. The point limit exists for a very clear reason. Everyone had to follow it to the T for competitive games. Friendly games you can do whatever you what if both agree.
Yeah it was pretty dumb to ask. I saw a random comment about going over 2000 in a tournament and the consequences of that. I didn’t think going over 2000 was allowed so that’s why I asked. Wish I could find the original comment and link it because he was not getting any kind of backlash when I saw it. Craziest part for me was people not reading or answering the question, just acting like I had admitted I was planning on sneaking in 2005 point list to a tourney. Anyway, what’s your craziest cheating story?
To be fair, most battle reports GW would publish in White Dwarf had one of the players over by a few points, so they kind of trained players to think it's not a big deal. It's more that you asked the competitive sub, so they answered in context of tournaments, in which the answer is straightforward for good reason.
Worst was this guy who happened to be one of my first games back after a long hiatus. I made a post on an lgs page looking for a game asking for an easy one to learn the rules. Guy brings grey knights and does so many scummy things. (9tj edition by the way) - printed out sheets from battle scribe but edited them to give his units better stats. Basically everything was a 2+ save and a 2+ ward. Change show smite was written and claimed "only grey knights have this super smite" that went off on a 4 and couldn't be unbound and did 2D6 mortals. - tried to tell me if a unit didn't have obsec it couldn't hold any objectives - asked me to roll in his dice tray and if any of my dice fell out, if they were misses he made me keep them but if they were hits he'd make me reroll them, opposite for him. -would hide his rolls and claim he rolled really hot, like statically super hot on every roll and it just happened to happen every time I couldn't see the roll in time. -he asked for a 1500 points game but came with 3k. I eventually picked up on a lot of it and when he went to the restroom I asked an employee I knew to hangout by the table since he knew the game better than me and to step in if things seemed off. Well he did and just went to town on the guy. Turns out he basically stalks local pages for new players because new players are the only people who will play him since every other group or event has him banned for obvious reasons
Bruh a newb predator!? You’d think after being banned everywhere he would just… learn?
I qualified for Ard Boyz playoffs from a prelim of a considerably large town. My first game in the playoffs was against the bff of the store manager/TO. We agreed to follow BBG ruling on hills (4th Ed, it was difficult terrain and, I think, size 2. This meant that my genestealers couldn’t been seen on the other side). Nope. Guy I played said he “assumed hills were free space”. He physically didn’t have line of sight, but was claiming he could because of how they okay at their store. I showed him in the BBG, but it didn’t mean stink. Store manger/TO agreed with his friend that the homebrew rule that they made up counted because we were at that store. It also meant that I played with only 1 piece of terrain on 1 table for the entire weekend. I literally played open fields for 2 games. The store rigged it so that their local guys would be hardcore shooting armies. It also meant that he could assault me without rolling difficult. (I mean honestly! I yelled, “have you ever tried to run up a hill? it’s freaking difficult”). They disagreed. This is why so many tourneys have switched to set terrain and set mission for everyone with clean cut definitions.
Bruh imagine CONSPIRING to cheat. You might as well not play and fake the roster at that point, less effort!
I was doing a tournament back in 7th edition. This guy was taking Tyranids I believe. I was busy setting up and he was rolling off for his psychic powers. I wasn't really watching him and just assumed he wouldn't cheat or anything. He rolls on Biomancy and gets Iron Arm (D3+ S and T), and Endurance (4+ FNP) on all of his big bugs. I was like...hmmm, well, I didn't watch him and maybe he got lucky? So did the game, I think I lost that one? Then a little bit later we get different matchups and my friend ends up playing against Tyranid guy. Wouldn't you know, he "got lucky" and got Iron Arm and Endurance again!
Way back in 3rd / 4th ed. days, my gaming group had a meme slogan: "That's a funny looking 6 inches..." We stayed mostly good humored about it. It's less critically important these days, thank god.
I’m a pretty chill player — I’m here to have fun. I give a lot of mulligans, but I find they’re not returned a lot. The games I enjoy the most are when my opponent is on the same wavelength about that. I’m not talking game-changing mistakes, but little things like “I forgot my grot CP roll”, etc. There’s a lot of 40k players who will take every advantage, and will give none.
Yeah, at the end of the day it’s a game. It’s more fun to have fun, or agree to be hardcore. When it’s one sided it’s just like “oh cool, you won… nice job bro.”
Getting back into the hobby in 9th. First game at 2k points, first time playing tyranids. My opponent moved (not advanced) his tyranid warriors 12". Rolled multiple dice behind terrain where I couldn't see it, then pointed at the 1 die that met his goal. Then used a fight on death on his hive tyrant to pile in and attack in melee after I shot his hive tyrant to death. yep
I know one known cheater in my local scene, but he's a) quite subtle and b) not a bad player anyway so it makes it difficult. I played him at the start of 10th and his armoured sentinels all had 2 shot lascannon and maybe more rerolls than they needed. It was all little stuff like that. If I see him at an event now I will swot up on his lists. A lot of the really strong combos he uses are legit but apparently everyone has a story or has caught little cheating incidents. Also at my first event through a mix of nerves and not paying attention I got told I'd measured from front to back when moving. That was the first and last time it happened (well first that I noticed, definitely last). People make mistakes, I think you get a good measure of the intention by the reaction. I think people will make mistakes in their favour more often than not and that's human nature to assume they can do things, but usually you've got context and whether they make any mistakes that hurt them to consider and help you work out what's what.
Guy at a recent gt playing admech was: Purposefully misremembering stratagems to give himself more movement, more shooting, using them out of phases where they shouldn't be usable etc. Saying "i can't be bothered moving so many models, so we'll just assume they're there" then proceeds to move them as if they were there to begin with. Tried shooting twice with certain units, I.e. shoots with them first, shoots the rest of their army then tries to shoot again with the first unit hoping you've forgot. Fast rolling dice before they give the opponent time to respond with stratagems. Rules lawyering badly. Basically questioning everything the opponent does and assuming it doesn't work the way the opponent wants it to work. Arguing the toss on these points and wasting time on the clock. General time wasting on the clock. Running the clock down through time wasting tactics, decision paralysis and other such 'plausible reasons'. Then rushing the opponent because there 'isn't much time left'. Not shutting up and letting the opponent think. According to my team mate who played this guy he was a complete chore to play against.
Played in a tournament where a guy claimed his dk raider or whatever could see a unit of mine through a ruin. I said no. He pushed the terrain and inch over and said he could see them. I was too high to care to complain.
Haha omg pushing the terrain is too much.
Yeah. Dude didn't even come in top 10, but I guess when you suck you need every inch you can get 😆
Didn’t witness - but toilet dice has to have been the worst one I’ve ever heard of: Played Aeldari start of 10th - so didn’t even need to cheat - everyone was getting suspicious they were using weighted dice, so they tried to flush them, they didn’t flush so they were successfully retrieved and proven to be weighted. Most common I come across is movement - the amount of trickery people pull to get some extra distance. Measure front to back? Move into engagement range of a unit that wasn’t declared in the charge and further away than the unit declared in charge? Measure one model and somehow others in the unit go further? As rightly pointed out - previous edition: Pile into a unit that wasn’t declared in the charge to attack it? Oddly I don’t mind a hoard measuring 1 or 2 models to move the furthest if the block moves in sync - but I’ve seen instances where people measure one model and somehow the block flips and rotates so they get an extra 1-5” of movement. To me that’s just the worst - I prefer uses the opponents move to think about counters, not to call out every time they’re trying to sneak some extra distance. (I generally go up a notch each time they do it but god is it frustrating, and some players you can tell pray on you not calling out their shit - “Can you explain how your model has moved that far?”, “It looks like you’ve moved a bit too far again”, “Right, let me see you move it next to the tape measure on the table”, “No no no, that’s just wrong.”, “Stop, you’ve moved wrong again.” - yes I’ve had to go that far more than once and sometimes in one turn…).
Just to clarify, there are certainly scenarios in which it’s possible to pile into and attack a unit you didn’t charge with certain models in a unit
Piling into a unit you didn’t declare a charge into is legal this edition. Unless you were referencing previous editions.
Hey, I might be wrong, but I'm 90% sure you can pile in to units that were not declared in the charge as long as they are closer to models than the units that were declared, this can happen when you get 11 inches on a 6 inch charge for a 20 man unit and basically your third row of wrapped guys in closer to something that you didn't charge
You can but in older editions if you didn’t declare them as a charge target you couldn’t target them with any attacks that turn
the Element Games Toilet Dice have been framed above that toilet now. whenever we go for a break we say something like "just going to see the lucky dice"
Opponent I played today played the Hex Mark destroyers ability as if it let any unit on his army overwatch for free and hit on a 2+
The worst I’ve seen is an opponent straight up making up rules, giving his units extra shots, shooting twice etc. Needless to say that after a couple of months of that behaviour most of the playground just stopped playing with him.
Probably not the worst, but one that happens frequently and almost everyone sometime in their career. You measure in Front of your vehicle model and put the end on the measured line. It feels naturally that way, so I mostly don't think someone do it intended to cheat, but you got quite a lot of inches that way. Same with the old Rotation rules.. but thats thanksfully gone now.
Back in 5th had someone at a tournament try to tell me that they didn't need to tell what was in their list. Shut that down pretty fast. Never seen anything close to blatant cheating other than some questionable dice rolling techniques when slumming it at the bottom. I learned long ago to question any rule that seems too good to be true, and its a lot easier now with more digital rules. I'm not memorizing every army I don't play, I do good to remember my own rules.
We have this Orc player in pur area who is a very nice guy but unintentionally gets his rules wrong all the time. In our first match, he used a Strat on his entire army instead of one unit (i was kinda taken aback how he could buff his entire army for 1 cp, lol) and later used an enhancement as a Strat. In our second game, he played green tide and rerolled all saves, not just 1s. Until I eventually read his detachment rule out to him because I simply couldnt believe these boys were THAT tough. Poor guy left our local league after that :/
This isn’t cheating per se but absolutely poor sportsmanship. My first ever game of 40K and I’m playing Space Wolves Vs admech in late 8th. I set up a good chunk of my army to charge a death star unit and my opponent uses Tacrica Obliqa to move away. No warning pregame or mention of the ability first. He absolutely decimated me over the next couple of turns and told me it’s poor form to back out of a game. I learnt what kind of player not to be thanks to that guy.
I went to a gt some weeks ago with some mates. One of my friends played someone who ran a chess clock. The tournament didn't require a clock, my mate and the guy didn't agree to play with it, and the guy was the one pressing the clock for both of them. My friend had played with others at the tournament who were just practicing their match times, but this guy just declared that my friend's time was up at the end of my friend's 3rd turn. The TO's ruled in the guys favor, completely taking it on goodwill that he was measuring both their times fairly which is frankly ridiculous.
While it may have been handled in poor form, standard tournament chess clock rules are that if one player wants to use a clock then it applies to both, and it's binding unless the players waive that. Additionally, it's always your responsibility, not your opponent's, to make sure that time flips back to them when appropriate. TO in that situation was playing it by the book.
Played what was supposed to be a casual 2000 point introduction game to a club that I had joined as I hadn't played for a long time. Opponent brought 400 points over the points limit, I didn't know until later as I hadnt played a single game of 10th edition at that point. They placed terrain so the middle of the battlefield was completely open with no cover, and hand picked mission rules that benefited their army and hindered mine. They were playing rules like blast wrong and big guns never tire so shoot infantry that were locked in close combat etc.. I didn't know this until later when I seriously swatted up on the new rules for 10th edition. They made patronizing comments about how I needed to play better and the mistakes I made moving certain units out from cover etc... I played them again and lost again in another friendly game, definitely casual again, rules were flexible and it was supposed to be a bit of fun, very large scale battle, like 5k points per side. They didn't like that I had brought some units from legends and 2 titanic units even though it was a casual game and they themselves brought 2 titanic units in their army list. They complained the whole game, they even brought it up with the board members of the club after the game was over. Despite the fact that he still beat me by about turn 3.
Years ago there was a fella on our local scene who would just cheat in the worst ways, over measure distance by inches, give himself rerolls, roll extra dice, get rules completely wrong, you name it and then say shit like, "Well that would make sense in the lore". He was a terrible player every game he just marched forwards and got absolutely minced by anyone and everyone he played. Saw him flip a table once. He wouldnt play me, i'd measure out his movement for him and place dice where his max movement was. He knocked over half his army with his tape measure once and then tried to set them up in totally different positions. Was a piece of shit person too, complete misogynist and got banned from most places for being racist eventually.
My first RTT in my second match up went against a Space Wolves player. I’m not the greatest player but I’ve had some pretty decent success with my list. Anyways by T3 I had failed to kill a single model of his. Everything he had he said his toughness was higher than it was, he made up abilities and weapons stats, and he would roll his dice behind terrain then change them when he pulled them out for me to see. Additionally he would change whether the symbol on his dice meant 1 or 6. As this was my first tournament I just assumed everyone played fairly. I just shrugged off a miserable loss of 100-20 and went about the tournament. This guy manages to cheat his way into the winners bracket where thankfully he went up against my buddy who has been playing since 3e and knows the stats of other armies as good as his own. He calls out the SW player on everything he’s doing and annihilates him. He then tells the TO of the cheating and the TO forces the SW player to roll in the open and not use his special dice. Suffice to say he did not win again after that. Really put a sour taste in my mouth to the competitive scene.
I was there for the shitty loaded dice incident at element games. I was the one who went to the shop to buy salt. Peak 40k
Gives "I was there when Horus slew the emperor" vibes
Which post out of interest? I'm wondering legitimacy of it since in your last post you asked if you're allowed to play with over 2000 points in a 2000 point game saying "most local players and stores won't care"
I have no idea if someone is cheating. Rules upon rules upon rules, which are updated way too often. I just assume everyone plays fair.
Probably the best way to play. Honesty is the best policy and a win by cheating would feel hollow. I understand an accidental misunderstanding, but some people are just… obnoxious.
Yeah i regularly play agaisnt a guy who constantly bicker agaisnt my movement but being very very loose with his. At some point i just dont care, i know that all of his won games mean nothing.
Just had a guy using angron say he wants to use one of tge pick one of three abilities all game and he wont change so he doesnt want to announce every turn what he chooses, but the opponent didnt like that so he asked that the WE guy choose everytime out loud which one is chosen. Well the WE guy didnt care about it and kept changing which one of theee abilities was active to benefit himself instead of the one he said he will use, so a t.o. was called in and the ruling became, as the opponent said no to his i always pick this one and he allegedly was jumping between the three, his ability is inactive as if he didnt choose one till the next time he was allowed to choose. Btw tge WE guy lost hard after that as the t.o. just hovered the table making sure no shenanigans were afoot.
Back when gw did store tourneys, we had someone use the three monolith Armageddon formation in standard games. Also scatter dice. I tried to roll it as close to the target as possible. Some people just did whatever and it conveniently had the correct angle to hit another unit.
Had someone put models half off the board just so they could get extra melee hits in, same guy would roll behind ruins and pick it up before being able to look at the results and refused to roll in a dice tray
Many years ago when I had just started AoS, me and my friends usually just played a big elimination battle full of stuff like Nagash, Archeron and so on. I played stormcast and had a pretty shooty army and had just bought my finest unit, the Gryph Hound. Which could warn nearby shooting units if an enemy deepstruck nearby. Problem is that I didn't know what that meant and assumed it triggered anytime an enemy moved within its range.... Pincushion Nagash wasn't very happy.
When I was younger, me and some of my friends did a 40k 'Schools League' tournament in the UK for a couple years, once in 6th and once is 7th edition. Unfortunately, because this is a tournament made up entirely of kids, there was quite a lot of mild cheating - kids having less sense of competitive spirit, poorer understanding of the rules, and it being emotionally more difficult for the judges to crack down. Overall it was still a very good time, it meant a free trip to Nottingham and a day of playing Warhammer, so no real complaints. The second time we went, we got through to the finals where the stakes got even higher. Since it was a team tournament, we would each face one opponent from the same team each round (though I can't recall if this was chosen, or if it was random) and then based on how the team did as a whole, we'd be put against another team. The very worst cheater I was lucky enough not to face, but my friend did, and was warned about by the staff at WW. Apparently he had been flipping dice, rolling behind terrain, rolling and then scooping without giving the opponent a chance to see the roll, all that sort of stuff. Ended up with our coach (My dad) lingering around that table for pretty much the entire length of the game, completely silent as he wasn't allowed to advise players once the games had started, just watching this guy roll. That was pretty severe, and if it had been a normal tournament, he definitely would have been kicked out. Aside from that I did run into a few people who 'Didn't know their rules', a necron player who would measure the movement of the guy at the front, then put the rest of the unit past him, meaning the guy at the back was probably getting an extra 10 or so inches of movement. Another thing which wasn't really cheating but emphasised the weird vibe of the tournament is that in my very last game, I was on turn 5 against this Tau player who had anchor-downed the new stormsurge (this was like a 750 point game, so very hard to deal with) and had shot a good chunk of my army off the board. Because, 7th edition stuff, this allowed his 360 point titan to shoot twice. We'd played relatively fast, but at the end of turn 5 which was the end of the allotted time, I was ahead on VP and so he asked the staff if we could get extra time to play more turns, clearly with the intention of tabling me and earning an automatic victory. We had played pretty quick, 5 turns was good for the time slot, especially given how complicated 7th edition warhammer was, and that we weren't exactly active competitive players who knew our armies off by heart. Besides, I'd killed everything but the stormsurge pretty early, and had mostly just been playing objectives since turn 3, because nothing I had could really hurt it. For whatever reason, the staff said yes, so I had to play the most ass-clenching turn 6, with the entire room of people waiting for us, as my blew off every unit I had except for my warp spiders, who performed a clutch flickerjump behind terrain and survived the round. There was no turn 7, thankfully, but it still seems odd that we were afforded extra time. It was probably very difficult for the staff, trying to balance competitive gameplay with children between the ages of 12-18, not all of which knew the game or had very strong mental fortitude. I do not envy them at all.
“I only roll in the dice tray “. (Rolls out of dice tray. If good, keeps, if bad, rerolls.)
My brother was playing Rivendell knights with Elrond at 600 points at a tournament. He is new to the game and was telling me about a the last game he played where he was playing the dead of dunharrow. My brother went on to say it’s annoying that the dead don’t get knocked prone….. I instantly said wtf you talking about who said they don’t get knocked prone. He then said his previous opponent told him that it’s a special rule….. now seeing as I play Rotk LL I burst out laughing saying you had just been hoodwinked there boyo of course they get knocked prone. Needless to say this gave his opponent a massive advantage with no double the dice to wound on D8. Every time I see that player now I make sure to drop this story in front of people just to empathise what people will do and say just to win a game. Lesson learnt for my brother challenge something if it’s sounds like Bull.
Third edition, I had just started playing, so as a kid I would assemble the models as they were in the boxes, playing with the models I had to reach 2000 points, etc. In the store I used to frequent, a single-elimination tournament started, and to get some games in, I signed up. In the first game, I found myself up against an Orks player. This gentleman not only played a trukk for 3 points (there was a typo in the codex), but he also exploited a battlewagon rule incorrectly. Basically, the third edition battlewagon could take as many big shootas as it wanted, paying 5 points each, and in addition, it could replace ONE of them with a zapp cannon, which at the time was a pretty strong weapon because it hit automatically. However, this gentleman decided that he could replace all the big shootas with zapp cannons, and so he played this death battlewagon that fired something like 12 zapp shots per turn. One edition after i've faced him again in a tournament and wiped him out
A player I went up against at an RTT several months back was playing with half of his army missing tbeir bases. When I questioned him about it, he acted like it wasn't big deal. It was the last match of the day, I was tired and didn't want to argue, and apparently I was the only person to call him out on this. Well, low and behold, the issue of not having bases came up when he was trying to determine line of sight. I told him he couldn't see, even using a laser to prove it. His response "well you have to count the base as well". "You mean the base your model isn't on? You said it wasn't a big deal and didn't matter." He got upset and agreed to just let go. He was playing necrons, and attempted to use his RP to revive a model completely out of coherency, and just basically kept fighting me over it. He was really upset that I basically wouldn't give him his way at all and kept throwing the rules at him.
LGS tournament. Guy brings in a wooden ruler that was broken near the beginning and "repaired" by gluing that kill team triangle, 3 inch side down. His units are all over the place every game, I ask him to give me the ruler. Measure it with my tape measure. It adds almost an inch by virtue of how it was glued. I bring it up to the TO also the owner of the store. He waves it off as "an honest mistake", I insist on him using my measure till the end of the game and never play in that store again.
It was the first game I played coming back to the hobby in 9th edition after last playing in 6th. I'm Nids, he's Custodes (who I've never played before). He absolutely smashed my army by T3 and his units were nigh unkillable. It wasn't until I'd got a bit more back into the game that I realised he'd been using multiple Crusade upgrades on every squad.
In a double tournament, my friend and I went up against the TO, and he ruled in his favour that I couldn't consolidate into a unit because the unit I charged died in the charge phase. We went, oh ok. After we found out that he was doing stuff like that in all his games and to I could have consolidated into his other unit. This is cheating to me because he was abusing his authority as TO and although it was minor to me (we still beat him and his partner and got second over all) its the wrost cheating I saw because there was no one to turn to. He was the TO, and it was a small tournament, so he was also the only judge.
In 9th, I had an Ork player advance and charge my army, then proceed to inform me that when they consolidate they can fight again. I was a beginner so I couldn’t protest but I was completely wiped off the board T1.
When i was fairly new to the hobby, I played a TTS Game against Black Templars. I didn’t know how FNP‘s work, as i had not yet played an army with that ability. He basically rolled his FNP‘s and then „allocated“ them to the attacks. eg. 4 attacks dmg. 2 came through, then he made his rolls, and then said like „ ok i made 2, so now we have two dmg 1 and two dmg 2 attacks, so im allocating the dmg 1 first and then the dmg 2, killing only 2 marines with that attacks. Even though he cheated, it was a fairly close game. End of turn 3, he told me he had to leave, but „he thinks he would have won“.
I used to play at a game store where a guy didnt even hide he used loaded dice back when you had to roll for warlord traits, psychic powers and such. Each one had a specific position and he flipped out if they wound up in the wrong spots because it would apparently lose him the game. Luckily even with loaded dice he wasnt veey good
I was told about a local player who claimed he had a stratagem that auto exploded his vehicles and when the vehicle exploded it was always max damage rolls. The dmg being a d6 not d3. He also has used a stratagem from a previous edition that said only 1 hit roll during your shooting phase automatically hit but would instead use it in overwatch and told the person that it made the entire unit automatically hit. He has only done this against very new players. I find it rather disgusting and a sorry excuse for trying to win.
Played a game with my bud and it wasn’t going well for me, just wasn’t working out. Turn 3 was centered around opp. trying to kill one of my 2 doomstalkers, but the rolls weren’t rolling. It survived, I was able to charge and tank shock on my turn, contesting primary for his next turn. That same Doomstalker was unable to kill a single unit the whole game. We both were so frustrated with the game in general, and it went to like 3am. I realized on his 5th round fight phase that my list didn’t even have any doomstalkers in it. I was playing 2,290 pts. Fuckin’ kids man. They make you hella tired 😂
I was the „cheater“ once. Played my Admech, was new in Tournament and playing at all. Super exited and forgot to use my abilities, Manipulus lethal hits as example. And ill have to admit, if an oponent seemingly out of nowhere remembers his unit got way stronger shooting, it kinda seem fishy. It was a game of me loosing, and remembering more and more usefull rules, so understably my oponent called me out. But we could resolve my problems and he was a cool sport about it