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So does anyone have any good stories about an opponent completely raging at losing a game? Or perhaps stories of particularly bad sports in general. Any incidents with a 40k, fantasy or other system battles? Would be interesting to hear people's experiences with this issue

I nearly got clocked by an old (metal) dreadnought once.

My main regular opponent was my best friend at the time, and he was prone to outbursts if things went particularly badly (IIRC he rolled three jams on the sustained fire dice on the assault cannon, and the resulting explosion killed the dread, but not 100% sure! it was near 20 years ago)

It wasn't, strictly speaking, thrown AT me, but I was sure as hell in the way of its trajectory until I threw myself off my chair and into the floor, it left a substantial dent in the wall!

I had a mate slam his hand down on a table once in frustration onto a square of Goblin Spearmen...priceless...he never did that again...

I slammed my hand down on the table once recently when a lost a mycetic spore pod and a whole squad of warriors to a single battlecannon round, I spilled my beer all over my Zuzzy mat and had to frantically move everything else out of the way! That's where I broke that habit and also, leaving beers in play during a game!

Lol, I've rage quit before. Whatever.

I had just teleported in some Termies, they get shot with 1 assault Cannon. All wounds, no rending, taking a big fat 2+...

All ones!

Oh well, lucky to even get em on the board they scattered so bad. Put em on the the table, take em back off the table.

Roll my bikes up same turn, gonna scoot all the way across the board and grab an objective and probably win.

Nope. All 7 guys get shot to death by bolters next turn. They didn't even blink. Put em on the table, take em back off the table.

Well maaaaaybe this old rusty Rhino can get her squad in to contest? Nope, screw you. One HK Missile from way back is going to pop that Rhino and wound half the squad. They all fail their armour saves and the rest of them proceed to run away. Right off the table!

I'm sorry but I'm allowed to be angry at my own ridiculous luck.

edit: Haven't chucked anything yet or smashed anything haha! I don't like to get angry over a game, but it's pretty damned hard not too when they cost so much and you devote so much time to them. I mean, I STILL have Berzerkers to finish painting! It's very disappointing when you just get worked really badly.

But what about poor winners? I hate it when someone cheers a bad roll, that just seems really shoddy to do. I mean yeah, if you roll bad that's good for your opponent, but it's still a bad roll. I just think an "aww that sucks mate, I just melted that guy!" is a lot better than some kind of Han Solo whoop...

I roasted 4 helldrakes as they came on the board a few weeks ago. The story goes; I was told to bring at triptide list all with HBC, interceptor, and skyfire, for the succinct purpose of griefing a particular player. Now I own the 3 riptide models only for highly competitive use. I won't bring them unless requested because, well duh.
The story goes, my opponent was already hot because his drakes didn't come in on turn two. so thinking he had my troops all but crispy when they all came in on three, he was rudely surprised by the rending rule on the HBC. It didn't help that we had onlookers, but when only one of the four survived with a single remaining hp he started muttering about "cheesy bullshite tau this spam that" as he started grabbing his models off the table. Nobody said a word to him as he left. But we think he knew someone had conspired against him. I was merely the sharpest tool in the shed for this particular job.

We haven't seen him since.

I've seen too many grown men take their toy soldiers way too seriously. It's always a little pathetic to see grown men throw temper tantrums. I get enough sportsmanship issues at home with my son - but he's six, so at least he has an excuse.

I try to only game with people i know now to reduce the chance of a rage quitter.


EDIT: Hmm, that came off way more pompous than i meant it to ! What i meant is that i try to only game with people i've interacted with a little bit, even if just a good conversation, etc. I tend to go to my LGS with a pack of friends so we have built in opponents, so its rare i'm hanging out in the shop looking for someone to get a game in against anyhow.

Can't say I've ever raged, never mind violent towards another player. At worst, I start to sulk when a game becomes unenjoyable (e.g. losing half my army on Turn 1 to Marbo and IG shooting).

My Xbox controllers on the other hand...

I was playing "Johnny Reb" with my ol' friend Dennis (God rest his soul), I rolled the flank of his union army with a conferate cavalry charge (in column). I should have totally been destroyed, but he folded.

I remember him cursing me to Dagon and literally jumping up and down in rage... a great memory.

- J

i knew a guy used the following list. he went for three stright months without losing, then finally loses to a SOB army and claims that the SOB player was using unfair rules and that SOB were broken and had a ton of cheesy units. he did not see the irony in what he just said.

this was the list he was using IIRC
Imotek the Stormlord
Retinue: 1 Chronometron Cryptek

Night Scythe w/5 Necron Warriors
Night Scythe w/5 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek

Doom Scythe
Doom Scythe
Doom Scythe

Imperial Bastion w/ Comms Relay

One time I raged so hard I snapped the table in half and left to break an orphanage with my bare hands. Then I ate all the orphans. The cause was that I lost a single assault marine as a lone casualty.

 OnlyWar wrote:
i knew a guy used the following list. he went for three stright months without losing, then finally loses to a SOB army and claims that the SOB player was using unfair rules and that SOB were broken and had a ton of cheesy units. he did not see the irony in what he just said.

this was the list he was using IIRC
Imotek the Stormlord
Retinue: 1 Chronometron Cryptek

Night Scythe w/5 Necron Warriors
Night Scythe w/5 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek
Night Scythe w/10 Necron Warriors + Voltaic Cryptek

Doom Scythe
Doom Scythe
Doom Scythe

Imperial Bastion w/ Comms Relay

I've seen this army list before! He copied it off 1d4chan!

When I was but a wee sprout, I beat a significantly older opponent at a CCG, using a deck composed of nothing but commons and uncommons. I seriously thought he was going to hit me, but another player got all barrel-chested on him and he settled down.

We had a particularly unhinged member of the gaming group back during the early days of 3rd.

We always played at his house as he was the only one with a dedicated war room.

One particular time after winning a war in which his Dark Angels commander killed a Bloodthirster in melee his opponent mentioned how stupid it was that the Bloodthirster had a lower initiative than the Space Marine, being an incarnation of the blood god etc.

They argued back and forth a while to our combined amusement when suddenly our Dark Angel obsessed fellow tore his own glasses off and broke them in half and promptly punched a hole in the wall of the war room (as mentioned this was his house thankfully)

Definitely haven't seen anything on that scale of nerd-raging since.

There is nothing more tragic/pathetic than seeing a grown man having a tantrum over toy soldiers. Its not something that I have seen all that much of however.

I have seen a spoilt little kid throw a metal dreadnaught across a GW before though.

Lol, wow...

Yeah I've never done anything quite half as bad as any of that, not anything you'd call a "tantrum"...

But they do piss me off sometimes, silly plastic toys! But I've only ever given up in disgust once, and that was the rollin all ones scenario. Had my fair share of turn 4-5 wow I lose because you killed everyone 'cept this half a squad type surrenders though! Like the time I spent two weeks trying to even dent my friends Tau list with my meagre CSM force, there was a few unconditional surrenders there. Finally beat him after 4 or 5 games...

I forfeited a game once because I was using epicroster for my list and it didn't save properly. We left the game overnight and when we came back to it I had no list, evrything was proxied so I was like "Meh, you win, start over?"

edit: Speaking of CCGs though I once had someone throw their entire hand at me playing MTG. Turns out people really really hate black discard decks...

I have worse rage fits playing video games than I do with tabletop games. Mainly due to the fact in a public area if you’re going to have a fit be sure you’re not some 5’ 4” pipsqueak (at the time) raging in front of someone literally twice your size, which was my MO during my early wargaming days.

My worst rage fit playing wargames was about two years ago playing a casual game of Warmachine with a friend and I couldn’t roll decent damage against his mangled up Behemoth. I pretty much wiped everything else off the board except his warcaster, the half dead behemoth and a few stragglers from an Ironfang unit. All I had to do was kill his Behemoth to get to his warcaster and it was game. After whiffing with the Stormclad pumped with two focus then poking it with a Centurion pumped with one focus for the charge the Behemoth was largely unscathed and h returned the favor on my friend’s turn to nearly wreck my stormclad. That caused me to throw my $30 custom dice across the room to be lost forever.

The worst rage fit I witnessed was between two older folks playing WHFB. One was playing Skaven and the other was playing Dwarves. All I remember was one threw some dice the other threw a “God Damn it” then next thing I knew the guy playing dwarves was slinging his models across the room. Needless to say it did not end well as the store owner/manager had to kick him out. A pathetic sight indeed when a grown man throws a tantrum over toy soldiers.

Last edition; first shot of the game was from my landraider against my opponents killa kan which I got very lucky with resulting in an explosion result. He hadn't moved yet and so his forces were packed pretty densely. The explosion hits a ton of infantry and one of his trucks which are consumed as well. I'm trying hard not to crack up as his forehead vein starts throbbing and he turns a distinct shade of purple. He loses about 1/3rd of his force including his boss and proceeds to flip his lid. He howls really loudly and swings his arm across the table literally sweeping his remaining force off the table and all over my floor. (breaking quite a few of his models in the process)

A separate game my brother is playing the same d-bag (this time at his house) and his ork warboss totally whiffs in a charge rolling all ones against some vanilla marines. He rages and proceeds to "punish" his metal warbosses failure by pounding the model into his dining table with his hard cover rulesbook. He keeps pounding away until he's ripped completely through the rear cover and about 10-15 pages, there's also a nice warboss shaped dent in the table. He then throws the book and storms off upstairs while crying. Despite the behavior of this guy is a grown man in his mid 30's. Needless to say we never game against him anymore.


My personal rage moment was playing a really long game of bad company with hard core death match, due to a lag issue he knifed me despite having unloaded an entire magazine into my last opponent which caused me to throw my controller and it broke a picture and damaged the left joystick so the L3 button no longer works.

I have once thrown a Battletech 'Mech (a plastic one) across the room because we'd spent nearly 2 hours playing a single game and I'd managed to hit nothing despite the bell curve being in my favour the entire time (6+ or 7+ on 2d6 for pretty much everything). My opponent understood.

Some great stories so far lol. It's nice to see people being honest and talk about the times they themselves raged.

Best one I can think of is years ago when playing Bloodbowl. One of the people in the league had a strength 8 troll (remarkably suspicious, especially as the guy who had apparently seen him make the stat increase roll was never at the club). The troll was represented by just a torso of the miniature, lying down(!) This was with the old edition of the rules, where the apothecary gave you a 2+ recovery roll for injuries.

The player with the troll went to block a lineman, and said something along the lines of "what sort of size do you want the coffin to be?" He then rolled triple-skull. Re-rolled, and rolled triple skull again. Rolled armour, beat the armour. Rolled injury, double 6 (this was death in the old rules). Then rolled for apothecary and rolled a one (failure)! All of this had happened in about 3 seconds with the guy just rolling so fast each time, and everyone watching stood in stunned disbelief. The guy he was playing said "I guess a troll-sized coffin." We all burst into laughter, which stopped when the player picked up the troll torso and hurled in across the room, threw his miniatures in a box and stomped off.

When Hector Rex had his awesome deamon fighting rules, one of the Chaos Deamons players had his FW bloodthirster attack him. Hector survived the initial assault, and took out the bloodthirster.

The guy walked outside for awhile. We just gamed on without him. Walked in, packed up, and left in the middle of an apocalypse game.

Second game, he had a shield generator up for 2 turns to block the lords of the black crusade. Our forces dropped an orbital bombardment away from him, one scatter later. All the guys were dead.

I Started as a Tyranids player.

My second game ever was against a 40 something year old dude who played Eldar and bragged about his oop metal wraithlord that he called "bob". He seemed to think that as I was a newb that I would be intimidated by his badly painted army and his attempts to throw his weight around at the campus club. I don't care whatsoever about a players age...I only mention that to illustrate my point.

Turn three "bob" was caught in a charge by my two carnifexes. He failed all the rolls and "bob" was ripped to shreds. This crippled his army and he subsequently went full tantrum.

He began yelling at me and crying. Called me all sorts of things......including cheesy. I can't see how a 4th codex with two carnifexes, a squad of warriors, and a bunch of gaunts fits that bill.

I have *thankfully* never seen his equal in my subsequent 6 years of play on four different continents.

My friend was painting a rhino with soem forge world bits on it. He got a finger pprint on the paint, so hurled the model at the concrete floor and stormed out. It smashed into many small bits that went flying all over the room. Never found it all.

Never done it in a wargame. When I was single I would rage on COD at home but never on the mic on rare occasions.

Did almost see full scale brawl once. We have a certain individual who can't seem to comprehend rules despite the fact he's read them more than once and will stubbornly insist he's right. Unfortunately he tried this act on one of our resident war veterans which didn't go over well.

It's funny how people can rage so much when all these games have fixed rules that everyone can check up on, they still manage to argue and get angry lol.
On a sort of side note, when someone calls someone's army "cheesy", what does that actually mean? Seen people say it a lot, does it mean their army has a lot of cliche models? Or that it just isn't a good list?

 Glaiceana wrote:
On a sort of side note, when someone calls someone's army "cheesy", what does that actually mean?

Calling an army cheesy is a form of cognitive dissonance ie. "I lost, therefore the army I fought was broken in some way and that caused me to lose. I did nothing wrong."

 H.B.M.C. wrote:


Calling an army cheesy is a form of cognitive dissonance ie. "I lost, therefore the army I fought was broken in some way and that caused me to lose. I did nothing wrong."

Not so much, in 3rd edition where you could make a formation where your models could be neither shot or assaulted so you could stand them in the middle of the field and be unable to be touched, there was 'Cheesy' stuff which broke the game wide open. Same with 180 cultists and 60-model Ork HQs which had to take 30 wounds before an ork could be hurt.

There was 'nothing' anyone could do in regards to those in 3rd edition. The game simply became a unplayable mess while one player just auto-won the game.

Ive had a friend have a bad game and flick his models down and contstantly say hes given up by the amount of gak rolls hes had, But no actually injuries = P

I understand getting alittle frusterated when you fail all your army saves on a 900 point Death Star = P

 Glaiceana wrote:

On a sort of side note, when someone calls someone's army "cheesy", what does that actually mean? Seen people say it a lot, does it mean their army has a lot of cliche models? Or that it just isn't a good list?

To try and give a more concise answer..

Cheese is using something which is legal within the rules, but not exactly sporting. It normally occurs via either fielding multiple units which are too powerful for their points cost, or exploiting a particular set of rules interactions. Two common examples would be Imperial Guard fielding many fliers, or daemons being able to give a unit a 2+ re-rollable invulnerable save.

What an individual deems cheesy tends to vary with their approach to the game (ie 'casual' players generally cry cheese a lot more often than 'competitive' players)

It is generally a byproduct of GW's wooly rules writing and lax play testing, so it is most prevalent, but not necessarily limited to, Warhammer and 40K.

Many years ago I was at a gaming convention and I signed up for a Wahammer Fantasy Battles game for noobs. I dont remember which edition it was (it had to be an early one). But it was 3 on 3 (basically we had a formation or two each) and in the first game a guy showed up with his own army (the game host had all the minis for everyone who didnt - and most of us used what he provided). Anyway, he lined up his formation up in one line (as opposed to ranks), and even after the game host stated if he failed a check that close to the table edge, they all would retreat off the board. Sure enough, in a round or two a couple minis from one of our opponents managed to reach his line, beat a sngle guy in the line in combat, he failed some roll, and off his entire group went. He was livid and threw all his minis into is box and stormed off. I was like, wow.

It was really my only time playing WFB and to be honest I havent played it since. It was a fun day, I played another game, but it wasnt something I wanted to invest a lot of my own money into.

But I think back on that guy, and others like him, and I think people react this way due to a few of reasons:

1) People seem to bond with their armies - They make personal choices in the troops they buy, and spend ALOT money and time building and painting them - far more than they play, and so to see a particular group get wacked prob hurts their ego (In my case I always had a terrible time with my Striking Scorpions, which I refuse to bother with today, and I spent so much time painting those guys cause I really like the models, but had really bad luck with them to the point I stopped using them.

2) People have a hard time with rules - Even in my case, I don't remember everything, nor spend a lot of time on what my opponents armies can do, so sometimes I am taken back by a skill a unit might have, where I am like, 'man had I known that' but I blame my own ignorance on that. Others prob think its BS, which is unjust.

3) And finally, just because you know the rules, doesnt mean you are good at tactics. In my own gaming group, I was practically undefeated in Adeptus Titanicus/Epic Space Marine, where I was good at strategy on a bigger scale, yet routinely got my ass handed to me at 40k, which is more tactical than strategical. You would think if I could manage hundreds of minis I could be fine with 30, but I wasnt. I think people's minds are just better at some things and others, and can't handle not being Patton at every game they play. And of course, there is always the luck of the dice, who many people can't handle either.