Despite this hobby [board games] essentially centring around competition, it is highly non-competitive. These gamers can quickly deduce optimal strategy and tactics, but they know that many good games feature chance, and that unpredictability can make them more fun. They revel in the experience irrespective of outcome, so long as it is elegantly balanced and designed. Their pleasure comes from the way a game makes them interact or think in ways they ordinarily wouldn’t or didn’t know they could. To a Gen Con gamer, games are akin to something like art — the experience of it is subjective and kind of the whole deal.
I think this is generally true, but oddly enough, the other day, my friend told me about a guy he plays with once or twice a year that is a blatant serial cheater. That guy's friends are apparently extremely nice people, but despite the blatantness (e.g. looking at cards he's not supposed to look at, announcing flurries of moves and results that aren't legal to overwhelm people), they don't call him out. They just say, wow, this guy is really good at board games!
There is no money involved here. The motivation here may be some sort of mental illness and/or sociopathy.
Board game can indeed reveal things about people. There was this one dude that seemed smart but was really sad online, and I thought hey, this fellow is just isolated and needs some human interaction.
I invited him over to play board games a few times, and he just turned out to be kind of a dick. I think there was one point at which we were playing Robo Rally. He turned out to not like the game, which is fine, but he kept sighing super loudly and constantly complained while every one else was trying to play. Another day he was at my house, he got into an argument with the guy, who was three years old at the time, and was strangely intense about it.