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My experience is mostly from Magic: the Gathering, so may not be applicable here but I have found a couple of effective tactics.

Make Attacking You Painful

Since the first person to be attacked frequently becomes a target for others, you must avoid being that player. To achieve this, the best way in my experience is to make attacking you involve a significant cost. In my games of Mtg one player has cards to make attacking them cost life/mana, or destroy creatures; but the cost does not have to be direct: If you make it clear that someone attacking you will receive your full wrath, they will think twice as to whether they can afford it.

Don't Let Them See Your Strength

Or more accurately, don't let them see you as a threat to them. Faced with a choice between defence and offence, choose defence until you can be sure that none who remain will be capable of retaliation. Frequently, in my experience, this involves someone who has done so little as to be forgotten suddenly pulling off an infinite combo.

Team Up With THEM

Before they decide to attack you, align yourself with them. There may be nothing forcing them to remain loyal but people tend to at least pay tribute to the idea, lest they be considered unreliable (side note: unreliable allies make excellent common enemies.) This does also free you to retaliate against people who do attack you. Just make sure that you can claim they betrayed you before you attack your allies. The one to break an alliance is rarely looked upon favourably.

Appear less threatening than you really are. Depending on the game, you have a variety of options available to you:

• Sandbag or stall your plan like Cohensius describes so that you are not the first target.


• Amass resources instead of spending them on flashy plays. For example, in Lords of Waterdeep, this could mean saving your resources for future plans instead of immediately completing quests. This means you won't be in the lead as often, and you'll also have more flexibility with which quests you complete.


• Change your play-style to play with more deception instead of straightforward strategies that are easy to gauge the threats from. For example, in Villainous avoid characters like King John, whose win condition is very easy for your opponents to keep track of.


• Play different games. Try games where it's less easy to directly sabotage another player or games that aren't zero-sum. For example, Terra Mystica is a competitive game, but the game is designed in a way that a good play for one player doesn't necessarily adversely affect the other players. There are a lot of mutually beneficial arrangements built into the game. Or even play team/cooperative games. People won't target you if they're your teammate.

If these changes of strategy don't work, then you really have a metagame problem with your reputation. In these cases, your targeting is not due to in-game decisions but rather to how fellow players perceive you as a player. Perhaps you really do win more than your fair share of games. Or maybe other players think you win more than you do because your victories are more memorable. You'll likely have to adjust your expectations of victory. Either way, the best advice is to take your lumps for a while, congratulate the victors, and subtly point out that there is a new king of the hill to overthrow.

There are many ways to mitigate this, although which one(s) work will depend on the game and the playgroup:

• Don't take an early lead. In a game where players have an easy way to penalize/attack one player, hanging out in second and pointing out how dangerous the person in first is can be a great way to sneak into the victory if everyone dogpiles the person in the lead.




• Make deals and/or build preemptive alliances to get people on your side before the ganging up happens. Make sure that your allies/trading partners feel that they are benefiting enough from your strength to not betray you.




• Go for victory routes that are less visibly obvious. If the game has both hidden and visible victory points, go for more of the hidden ones. Alternatively, prepare yourself to seize a number of objectives simultaneously so that when you gain the lead, it is sudden and harder to stop.




• Focus on infrastructure in the early game rather than points. Build up a base that makes it easier for you to do things and/or attack other people rather than initially trying to win, and then be opportunistic.




• Play games with hidden victory points (such as Chinatown or Smallworld) or a game where victory points are sufficiently hard to calculate (Agricola, 7 Wonders) so that people can't necessarily tell who's winning in order to gang up on that person.




• Play games that don't have as many ways of attacking people (Power Grid, Chinatown, 7 Wonders, Race for the Galaxy) or where attacks are directed by the game rather than by players (Cosmic Encounter, Dominion (depending on the kingdom cards))




• Play games that have 2 teams (Battlestar the Board Game, Star Wars Rebellion, Descent) to remove the problems of multiplayer dynamics while still playing with a large group.

You could embrace your notoriety and play with "everyone vs you"-rules. For example, Magic: The Gathering has an "Archenemy" game mode, where one player is the "Archenemy" and everyone else gangs up on them. It might not make you win more, but you won't feel cheated, and victory will be all the more sweet. You could also take turns being the "Archenemy" so the others get a taste of their own collusive medicine.

I think the important thing to distinguish is why the other players are attacking you for. Are they attacking you because:

1. it is funny to them? (them attacking you has little to no benefit to them in game, and they enjoy seeing you suffer more then they enjoy winning the game)


2. you are too good at other games compared to them and they think you will win the game unless teamed up against?


3. you get ahead in the game too early and seem like the biggest threat in early stages of the game?

If it is the first one, you may want to talk to your friends, explaining to them that attacking you just for the heck of it is making games unenjoyable to you.

If it is the second one, then ooph. Tough spot. You may have to lose a few games before you try to run the argument of "Hey, I keep losing at this game, so why not attack player X, who has won this game way more times then I did?"

If it is the third one, you have landed yourself in what is called the "early leader syndrome" (term taken from the board game Diplomacy). This means the other players see your score early, think you are the biggest threat, and hurl everything they got against you because they think you'll win otherwise. The key strategy against this situation is to be at a good spot, but not at the best spot. For that, you have to figure out what the players think matters the most in the game. For example, in Lords of Waterdeep, if players focus on the victory points, try to spend your early game actions to create an engine that will help you score quests instead of trying to score quests (focus on plot quests or buildings that will help you complete quests instead of trying to complete 10+ victory point quests). If the players are experienced enough to judge who is the biggest threat based on the engine they create, then try to create the second best engine, and then point out to everyone that there is a player who is a bigger threat than you. In my gaming sessions for example, whoever gets the quest for hiring the Lieutenant becomes public enemy number one, and is screwed over whenever able. That is when I build my engine. "Oh, I am totally buying this building to screw over the lieutenant holder, nothing else"

Make yourself beneficial to them

As with some of the other answers, this one is coming from experience with the card game Magic: The Gathering.

I have a reputation among my friends of being tactical and pulling out surprise combos and come-from-behind victories. This causes me to be a frequent target if the deck I'm using can't readily fend them off. One deck in particular simply isn't a strong enough deck to do that, so I took a different approach.

In that deck, I added a card called Curse of Echoes. You target a player with it, and then as long as that card remains active, then whenever that player casts a sorcery or instant, all other players get to copy that sorcery or instant.

I wait to play that card until I know who is leading, or who has the most sorceries and instants to play, and then I put it on that person. And just like that, I'm no longer a target from anyone except that one player! Now, instead of trying to eliminate me, the other players actively try to protect me because I am useful to them!

And at that point, as weak as that deck is, I'm suddenly very likely to actually win the game, because I am now beneficial to the other players.