**AITA for “soft-locking” my brother out of my life after he turned Monopoly into a bloodsport?**
*Posted in r/BoardGameHorrorStories • 4.8k upvotes*
(Obligatory “on mobile, sorry for formatting.”)
Okay, so my (28M) brother (32M) is one of *those* people. You know the type—watches 40-minute “strategy guides” for Catan, calls “house rules” a “fallacy for the weak,” and unironically uses the phrase “meta-gaming.”
Last weekend, we had a family game night. I busted out a vintage copy of *Operation* I found at a thrift store. Fun, low-stakes, right? WRONG. This man pulled out a *spreadsheet*. He had calculated the exact probability of the buzzer going off based on the electrical resistance of the 1980s plastic.
He then accused my 7-year-old niece of “intentionally tilting the board” to change the gravity vector and “exploit the cavity’s hitbox.” The kid was crying. My mom is now in therapy.
So I snapped. I grabbed the tweezers, removed the “butterfly fracture” piece, and said, “Congratulations. You win the game, and also the prize of never being invited back.” He called me a “gatekeeping casual” and said I was “ruining the sanctity of competitive tabletop experiences.”
Now my aunt is texting me saying I “need to respect his passion.” But TL;DR – Am I the asshole for banning my spreadsheet-wielding, Operation-optimizing sibling from family game night, or should I have just let him nerf the fun out of existence?
**EDIT:** *Thanks for the silver! And no, I won’t post the spreadsheet. I’m not giving him the satisfaction of a wider audience