IDK that hasn't been my experience. When I've gotten together with people to play euchre it's always people who are super competitive about it, get annoyed if you misplay a hand, and don't talk about anything except how good or bad their last hand was.
That's my experience as well. In my opinion, "social" board games are always an excuse for the people who propose it to "dominate" others in an activity they don't do as often and don't care about much.
They call it socializing but it is always a type of problematic socialisation because it always ends up hypercompetitive and solely focused on the game.
We know humans can't truly multi-task and this is true for games too, so what happens is that as the game progresses everyone is increasingly focused on its strategy and no real conversation about anything else happens.
I think it is actually a crutch for people that are not that interesting to begin with and prefer to retort to this sort of activity (passive-agressive competitiveness built-in) instead of cultivating something interesting to talk about with other peoples.
I'm all for socialisation by talking or doing shared activities with a common goal, but games and to an extent sports are really more trouble than they are worth most of the time...
Sounds to me like you are maybe the competitive one. It could be that you are friends with board-gaming sociopaths but in my life I have met only one person who I think would propose a board game just because they could win at it.
