It all started on a warm summer night, the trees were swaying, the moon was glowing, and the stars were twinkling bright… Well actually I was just making that up because I spent that entire night inside playing video games. This night was a special night in particular because I had invited some of my old friends over to spend the night. We all had not seen each other for a very long time so we were really excited for this. I had spent the entire week preparing for that night and when it finally came I was so excited I could hardly breathe! When my friends finally arrived at my small, one-story house, we realized that although we were really excited for this event we actually didn’t know what we were going to do. So I decided to do what I always do when I’m bored, scour the videogame pile. My videogame pile was very messy and untidy, which is why it took so long for me to find a game for us to play. After about 5 minutes of scouring it seemed like I couldn’t find a game for us to play, but then I stumbled upon the greatest party game of all, Super Mario Party. Super Mario Party is a game that plays exactly like a board game. The game has you play as characters from the Super Mario series. The objective of the game is to roll dice and travel across the board, competing in mini-games with the goal of trying to obtain stars, which is what you need to win the game. Seizing the opportunity, I immediately grabbed the game card and stuck it in the game console.

Now here’s one thing I forgot about when I decided we should play Mario Party, I suck at it. I’ve never won a game against my two good friends and I knew I never would. My two friends were pros at board games, they’ve always had better luck than me. I finally realized that when we got to the character select screen and my friend said, 

“You ready to lose again buddy.”

“Oh, um not this time!” I responded, finally realizing what I stated before. I didn’t want to spend this night getting my butt kicked, and I knew there was no way I could beat them on my own. I then Immediately thought of a master scheme that just might work. My idea was that I would grab an extra controller and put it under my massive couch, I would then control two characters with the controllers and convince my friends the other player was just an AI bot. This way I could gang up on both my friends. I knew this was cheating, but I was desperate for any way to win that night, and I would not take another loss again.

 After me and my two friends selected our characters and I got my other controller up and running, we finally started the game. Everything started off pretty well… for my friends. They were already a quarter-way to the first star, while I had only moved five spaces. This was kind of expected, and this is what I meant by the fact that I have horrible luck. On the bright side my second character was already making steady progress. I had already made it close to the shop and had a decent amount of coins on that character. My plan was to use my second character to buy a poison mushroom to make it so my friends couldn’t move for a couple of turns. This would give me time for my main character to catch up to my friends and get close to the star. The plan ended up working successfully, but my friends were a little surprised by the fact that the poison mushroom didn’t target me. Everything was going according to plan until I realized I had made a slight miscalculation. How was I going to play the minigames with two characters at once. If I don’t use the second character they’ll find out that it was hooked up to a controller and that I was cheating, but if they caught me using two controllers they would also know I was cheating. I was desperately thinking of a plan and when the first minigame started I finally thought of one. I put my feet under the couch and used my toes to control the second character, this also allowed me to continue cheating. I ended up winning the minigame with my main character and got a boatload of coins, but still my friends were confused by the fact that the AI character was targeting them, but we still continued on. As the turns went by and the game progressed, my friends were getting more and more suspicious about my second character. Finally after about eighteen turns we were on the second to last turn, and even though I cheated we all still even in stars. I was the closest to the star and victory seemed in my hands, so I decided to inch even closer to the star. After both my friends did their turns it was my second character’s turn. I rolled the die proudly, knowing I had already won. But then, I ended for the first time rolling a ten, and was forced to block my main character’s path. I was so infuriated that I accidentally kicked my controller from underneath the couch which revealed to my friends that I was cheating.

I could have won that game and have a better time with my friends if I didn’t cheat that night. But I let my jealousy get the best of me and ended up breaking the trust between my friends. But in the end we had a good night and I learned my lesson: cheating isn’t the best answer.