If you’ll cheat at family game night, the stakes were never the problem. You were.

Nothing is riding on a board game, which strips away every excuse about pressure or necessity. When somebody bends the rules there anyway, it is not about the prize. It is about wanting to win enough to override how the winning happens, and that impulse does not switch off when the stakes go up. It just finds a bigger room.

This is worth noticing rather than feeling awful about. Play one game completely straight and see how much you dislike losing it. Getting easy with meaningless losses makes the real games much simpler to play clean.