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lovingboth) wrote2016-09-21 10:58 pm
Getting the rules wrong
Yesterday, someone found out they'd been playing a favourite board game wrongly / 'not according to the printed rules'. In this case, the missed rule makes a better game and the judgement involved is half the skill in something that has a lot of luck already.
But lots of people ignore rules. Few people play Monopoly without adding some variant or other, usually making it a worse game* by increasing the money supply or reducing limits on houses or.. Even the current rights owners have been guilty of that, including by adding another die to make it easier to land on squares you want to land on / easier to avoid ones you don't.
I've been taught games wrongly – the classic example was the game where the owner had missed that each turn you could do only one of four things and thought you could do all four, every turn. The game didn't last long…
Some people make a fortune out of it: Othello is Reversi with a restriction saying you have to start with one of two opening positions. Somehow, the Japanese patent office granted a patent on it anyway and the 'inventor' cleaned up.
Some games are improved by tweaks. I think one favourite has one mechanism, a favourite of the designer, too many and so do without it.
What's your missed / ignored / improved rule story?
* Feel free to substitute 'an even worse'…
Mirrored from my website's blog, The deranged mad of a brain man.
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We're now recording scores (Conflux decided this was a good idea only *after* I was leading 5-1 this month), so of course the first recorded score is when I managed to get a whole 7 points and he got a good 196 (neither of us has managed to get over 200 nor a negative score yet). One more turn and I would have redeemed the situation and possibly won, albeit doing the 4-point Oslo-Stockholm route via Narvik. I texted Djm4 for his amusement, and should have predicted the answer:
"I've actually travelled Oslo-Stockholm via Narvik..."!
I'm thinking Carcassonne without farmers might be a good way to get the kids into it.
I recently played Munchkin where people didn't argue about what you could pull out during a fight and you could use any card in front of you or in your hand at any moment, which made it way less rules-lawyery and sped the game up no end, which improved it immensely.
I did enjoy a game of Diplomacy via email around 2000 - Steve Demant was GMing it and I have no idea who any of the other players were. We did two moves a week mostly and got a 3-way draw after about 9 months.
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Having played a copy of the 'new' Z-Man rather than Rio Grande Carcassonne at the Big Bi Fun Day this year, this is more or less what they do: 'basic' game with no farmers and 'advanced' with.