AC/DC, sledging and booze: dirty deeds to help you cheat at Christmas board games A study reports that playing Highway to Hell could be just the thing to break your opponent’s concentration.

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Ever since the beginning of games, people have been finding ways to unfairly gain the upper hand. These cheaters sometimes get away, but that’s almost always not the case. Here are 8 times that hackers, match-fixers, aimbot-users, and even screen-cheaters got caught red-handed.

KiD x – Overwatch

KiD x, a top-200 Overwatch player and high profile streamer on the Korean server, was banned for using an aimbot. However, this ban didn’t happen in privacy- KiD x was streaming when the ban hammer fell. His use of an aimbot wasn’t hidden at all. Blizzard found out almost immediately and shut down KiDx’s account mid-stream. Blizzard has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to dealing with cheaters, so KiDx’s ban is permanent.

Darksider- Guild Wars 2

Credit: ArenaNet

In ArenaNet’s MMO Guild Wars 2, cheaters were not tolerated. One look at the case of player Darksider will let you know that they meant business. Darksider was a notorious hacker- he terrorized the MMO’s PvP zones for weeks. The player’s character was impossibly strong, nearly impossible to kill, and had the power of teleportation. The player was reported thousands of times before the head of security for the game took control. He seized the Darksider’s account (and all accounts associated with him) and humiliated him. He took control of the avatar, walked him up to a high place where all could see, stripped the character naked, made him wave goodbye, then sent him falling to his death (and a permanent ban). There was some controversy about ArenaNet handling the hacker problem unprofessionally, but there’s no denying that it was hilarious.

League of Legends Match Fixing

Note: Screenshot not from tournament described
Credit: Riot Games

This one is the 1919 World Series of eSports. In the finals of the MLG 2012 Summer Championships, Team Dignitas and Curse NA shocked the crowd. Instead of a normal match, the game was played “All-Random, All-Mid” where each of the players picks a random champion and both teams only play in the middle lane of the map (which has 3 lanes and a jungle). Dignitas and Curse met before the game and decided to split the prize money regardless of the outcome, and settled on playing a game of “ARAM”. The cheaters were of course found out, and MLG disqualified both teams. No one was banned, but the final was a disaster for MLG, who were just trying to put on a respectable professional competition.

Player Killer – Red Dead Redemption

Credit: Rockstar Games

In Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption online, cheating isn’t outright punished. Rather, the game turns against you. If a player racks up enough player complaints (from things like hacking), Rockstar will brand him or her a player killer- a title that carries a lot of weight. The punishment makes it hard to find friendly people online and comes with another, more brutal stipulation. You stick out like a sore thumb to both other players and NPC’s- you have a permanent wanted level.

D1ablo – Call of Duty 4

People play on each other’s accounts all the time. Sometimes it’s just for fun, sometimes it’s to “boost” (also cheating) someone. And other times, it’s to let another player play for you in a sanctioned Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare competition. FatGames, a COD team, decided to try to pull off one of the dumbest cheating attempts of all time. They gave one of their new players (who hadn’t been playing long enough to compete, based on league rules) the login details of the player he was replacing on the team. They got caught and turned in immediately. Both D1ablo (the new kid) and the person who gave him the login details (Stat) were banned for 6 months and the league deducted major points from FatGames.

Azubu Frost – League of Legends

Credit: AviarysNation – Youtube

At the League of Legends World Championships in 2012, Korean team Azubu Frost was caught cheating the old-fashioned way- peeking at the other team’s screens. Okay, while they didn’t ACTUALLY look at their opponents’ screens, but they did occasionally peek up at the big screens situated above them, which displayed the locations of everyone in the game. Their cheating resulted in a massive scandal and a fine of $30,000. You can check out more proof of their cheating here.

KQLY and SF – Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Similar to the KiD x incident, this scandal involves high-profile players using aimbots. Professional CS:GO players KQLY and SF of Titan and Epsilon, respectively, were caught using aimbot software in late 2014. Both teams “removed” (read: fired) the cheaters from their teams. Even though KQLY used the software for a week outside of competitive context, he was still punished. This debacle led to a bunch of other bans- some justified, some not.

Youtube Apologies – H1Z1

Credit: Daybreak Game Company

This one is pretty damn funny- the developers of H1Z1 went on a massive ban spree after reports of thousands of hackers came to light. After the bans, many of the cheaters sent messages to them asking for forgiveness in hopes that they’d be allowed to play again. The developers decided to lift their bans, but only on one condition- anyone that wanted back in had to make a youtube video explaining what they did to deserve the ban in the first place and then apologize for their actions. You can check some of those videos out here and here.

Sometimes gamers are falsely accused of cheating, like the time this Battlefield 1 Sniper Was Accused of Cheating after Releasing Unbelievable Kill Compilation

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Hackers used FIFA to steal money from EA
A jury in Texas found Anthony Clark guilty of “conspiracy to commit wire fraud” after he and another three hackers found a way of mining in-game Fifa currency and selling it to other players. The thing is that EA makes money off of these coins so deciding to interfere with their in-house business kind of means you’re directly stealing from them. Because these hackers weren’t the brightest bunch, they transferred the money directly to their bank accounts so you can see how simple it was for the authorities to find out who they are.

Police Pressing Charges against Cheaters in Sudden Attack
When you decide to cheat in a video game you have to make sure you don’t make any money out of it, because otherwise you’ll be legally facing charges, similar to the FIFA case. Two seventeen-year-olds and one college freshman were making millions of yen from posting and selling cheats online until the developers of Sudden Attack received complaints regarding the cheats so they decided to call the police and report the ongoing scam. As a result, the group of “businessmen” got themselves a couple of charges for online fraud.

I tend to mutter to myself when I play board games. Working out strategies, crunching numbers, fretting over tactical options—it’s an annoying habit that kicks into overdrive when I’m playing a game solo. (This is naturally to the eternal consternation of my longsuffering wife, who is often in the same room as I mumble endlessly about efficient wood-to-stone conversion rates.) But while I was doing a solo playthrough of the first scenario in The 7th Continent, a new cooperative adventure board game, most of my monologues came out as exclamations of surprised joy.

Oh my God, that is SO cool.
Wait...but how does that… oh. Wow. Wowww.
What?!! I love that!!

The 7th Continent is something else. It’s a giant game filled to the brim with genuinely innovative and exciting ideas. The game has its predecessors, of course, but you’ve never played anything quite like it. It bills itself as a Choose Your Own Adventure book in board game form, a sort of open-world pulpy adventure that you can play by yourself or with up to three friends. Add in its heavy emphasis on exploration, survival, and crafting, and you can practically hear gamers of all stripes—from nostalgic Fighting Fantasy fans to Steam Early Access crafting-game junkies—salivating uncontrollably.

With the game’s second printing on Kickstarter right now, it’s pretty much the only thing board gamers are talking about this month. But it’s a very unique type of experience that's likely not for everyone. Is it for you?

This review contains what some might consider light spoilers (nothing beyond what can be found on its Kickstarter page). If you want to go into the game completely blind, come back later.

We have to go back, Kate

It’s 1907, you’re an explorer, and you feel like crap.

Several weeks ago, you were part of an expedition to the 7th continent, a mysterious and newly discovered land off the coast of Antarctica. At some point during your adventures (you don’t remember when or how), you picked up a curse of some sort—a physical and mental affliction that haunts your daytime thoughts and plunges your nights into exhausting, restless sleep. It’s been rough.

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And then, one night, in the middle of one of your curse-fueled fever dreams, you awake with a start to find yourself… back on the 7th continent? But didn’t you… weren’t you just… ? The only thing you know with any certainty is that the curse came from this place, and if there’s any chance you can lift it, you’re going to have to get to work.

Voracious Goddess

Belying the imposing double-sided and icon-laden player aids, the gameplay of The 7th Continent is so straightforward that you could start a new player off with almost no explanation. Do an action, draw some cards, see what happens next.

The gameplay is driven entirely by a huge box of almost 1,000 numbered, square-shaped cards. They sit in trays complete with numerical dividers, and almost every time you want to do something in the game, you’ll dive into the box and pluck out a card. Decide to travel east? Pull card 163. Open that mysterious box? 345. Examine those footprints leading off into the brush? Hold your breath and dig out card 230.

There are essentially two types of cards in the game: adventure cards, representing the terrain and contents of the continent, and action cards, which you’ll play and manipulate to move around and take actions.

You start each curse—essentially a scenario that gives you a goal to accomplish—by placing your character(s) on an adventure card representing a patch of land on the continent. 'The Voracious Goddess,' the main curse I played, started me off with two vague clues: a sketchy map and the idea that I had been seeing tortured visions of a strange idol.

And that’s pretty much it—go forth and lift the curse! Here’s where The 7th Continent immediately starts to shine. There are no game “rounds.” The game doesn’t get a “phase” where it fights back at you like in many cooperative games. There isn’t even a set start and end point for each session. Instead, you simply take a turn by doing an action, and you keep on going until you’re satisfied with your session.

Cheating At Board Games Reddit Game

You then create what’s essentially a savefile of your game and pack the whole thing up; the next session, you pick up right where you left off. Each scenario is a long, continuous adventure that you play in sessions that are as long or short as you want. My playthrough of the Voracious Goddess took about 15 hours, and I played it in standard 90-120 minute sessions. You’ll eventually either lift the curse or die trying.