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What's a "house rule" that has made a game more fun for you?
A "house rule" is one that isn't explicitly in the game but that you choose to apply nonetheless. The question can apply to either videogames or tabletop games.
What's the rule/ruleset?
How does it affect your enjoyment of the game?
For games like Overcooked (and to a lesser extent Plate Up!), having a 5th person as "Gordon Ramsay" accommodates more players and makes it more hilarious, especially if you're yelling "BEHIND" or "YES CHEF" and calling each other donuts.
Oh that sounds way more fun than the base game :D
haha it was definitely a way to accomodate more people when we were playing in college dorms, since I used to let people just kinda walk in and out of our room while we gamed. it's much harder to get 5 people together in person now :') but we have Jackbox and stuff like that for that now too.
yeah I hear you :(
man, that must have been fun to have wandering kids join random games.....
haha yeah that was the one thing i missed about being in a dorm, gaming with the door open, people would walk in and ask what i was playing, or join in on some party games if we had them going.
You don't even need a fifth, just identify one player as the head chef and everyone is forced to listen to them. For even more chaos, head chef rotates every round.
This sounds like Captain and Conn mode when playing FTL. One person is taking the others orders and no pauses are allowed. Accents are recommended but not required.
Many years ago I visited some college friends at their country house in Woodstock, NY. They had a particular way of playing croquet:
First, the house was on several acres, with lots of challenging surfaces and slopes. This is where you placed the wickets. Second, you always had to have a beer in one hand.
It has improved my family’s enjoyment of croquet immensely.
When I was a kid my cousin and I often played "Extreme Croquet" where we built elaborate mini-golf-like croquet courses with ramps and obstacles, and the hoops placed in difficult places like halfway up a tree – requiring a ramp and golf like swing to get the ball through. It was a lot of fun!
And my cousin and I played "Executive Ping Pong." Sit in chairs with your feet up on the table and try to rally. We didn't get far with that, actually.
When playing Canvas (an art creating game), our house rule is that when presenting your art piece, you have to do so as if you were a pretentious art critic. The cards form a title for the painting that you can use in your answer, like "Delicate Complexity", "Dark Effervescence", etc.
Sometimes the combinations result in something hilariously stupid, other times it can be kinda mundane, and every now and again you'll get something that makes you go "huh that's an interesting take"
Canvas is such a good game. It's a hit with everybody I've played it with. I'll have to incorporate this into our next game.
I love Canvas and have always done stuff like that. Personally, I love going for the literal "No, this painting represents that God hates books and is raining fire on them."
I've been waiting for a chance to try the expansions as well.
This applies to all tabletop games we play as a family:
The winner is responsible for cleaning the game up.
If you loose due to just bad luck, there is a certain level of saltiness that you might experience. You can then either get a happiness boost that you won't have to clean the game up, or just allow yourself to get distance to the game and do something else to uplift your current mindset.
The winner gets a small dampening effect on their win and has time, while cleaning up, to reflect on the fairness of the game.
Most of the times everyone helps cleaning up, but it helps to keep the peace on very frustrating matches.
It has also the added benefit of teaching kids. The winner has time (while clearing the table) to reflect on their win and figure out if it was mostly luck, or if they played really well, which in turn reduces boasting and taunting about their win. The loser learns that it is ok to distance yourself from "unfair" losses and teaches them ways to cope with it.
I really like that this rule softly optimizes competing for second place. It's the best win with no downside. I am a huge fan of trying to make games that encourage meta play like that.
One of our local bars used to host a trivia night. The prize for the first place team was a $15 gift card. The prize for the second place team was a round of drinks. If you had a group of four, the round of drinks was ever so slightly more valuable. Without fail, toward the end of the game, the people in the top three positions would be trying to do quick math to know when to throw a question, or try to guess when the other team was going to throw. It was always a fantastic time when the team that ended up winning ended up being just a tad angry and the team that got second place always cheered.
That's a really interesting concept and I agree that it makes things more thought-out and strategic. I wonder what other games would benefit from the 'winners' being whoever came in second place. Might help to bridge a skill gap if one player is miles ahead of the others, since that player is now actively trying make some 'mistakes' instead of just running away with the game (which would not be fun for anyone).
The first episode of the new season of "Game Changer" on Dropout (Game Changer's a comedy game show wherein the rules are different every episode and the players don't know what the rules are when the game starts) has a similar vibe. The person in 2nd place in each round of the competition gets the points, and the person in 2nd place at the end wins the game.
It's a particularly good episode because Brennan Lee Mulligan is a very competitive person and totally refuses to do less than his best. He makes a very good show of it.
I like this.
Real life example, in a curling game, it's fairly customary for the winning team to buy a pitcher of drinks to share with the losing team
I also have very fond memories of playing (in a funspiel) against a team that was obviously way way way better than us, and for the rest of the match they basically coached us on what to do and how to execute it, and use their turns to practice extremely difficult trick shots that wouldn't make sense to take risks on normally. Basically both teams just congratulating each other for shots and it was a fantastic time.
When running my d20 TTRPGs (regardless of the specific system), I use exploding dice. What this means is that if someone rolls a 20 (or a 1 if you're feeling
meanspicy), then they roll again and continue until they stop rolling 20s. If you roll a single 20, then it's just a normal critical success. But, if you roll more than one then the success is successively greater. Usually this ends up meaning that a second 20 becomes hyper-competent and the super rare 3rd 20 is an auto-win for the encounter (I've never had someone roll 4 in a row, but I'm sure everyone at the table can come up with a reasonable reward for a 1 in 160,000 chance).Oooh I like this. What kind of events would be warranted if someone roles four 1s in a row?
Your party all roll up new characters.
I don't know. Coming up with it in the moment is part of the fun. Whatever it is, it needs to be something the whole table will tell stories about for the next several years. I'd like to get input from the table about what feels fair and reasonable. It's also going to depend a lot on the context. Playing a one shot probably shouldn't have the result being the player being sucked into a demiplane and a dozen session side quest to rescue them, but at the same time, in a 100 session campaign, having the party merely lose the encounter also seem wrong. So, basically the same as the 20 case, but bad instead of good.
The caution to critical fails is that it punishes the hell out of mutiattack classes. Monks especially roll more dice, and as such are more likely to roll 1s. Now if just a normal 1 is a fail and a SECOND 1 is the crit fail, then you've probably lowered the odds enough that it will still feel interesting when it happens, but remember those who roll the most dice will be affected the worst.
Strategic paper eating. The ultimate house rule in my book.
There's a party game we call Celebrity (also known as Fishbowl, packaged up as Monikers for those who don't want to make their own clues) where you write down a bunch of names of famous people and characters on pieces of paper, then teams of 2 hint at and guess as many as they can over the course of 60 second rounds, with new restrictions in place every time all the names in the bowl have been exhausted and players gain enough familiarity to be able to guess them with new restrictions (unlimited words -> 2 word hints -> mime).
The rules we started with, which feel appropriate but imperfect, do not allow for skipping. If you pull a name and can't get your partner to guess it, you're out of luck waiting for the rest of the 60 seconds to transpire. I've played with another group that did allow skipping, and this provides no reward for sticking it out on a hard name, and basically encourages recycling it immediately to get an easier name.
It felt right to us that skipping ought to incur a penalty, but taking a time penalty, for example, would still encourage abuse of skipping if the name itself is hard enough, forcing another team to eventually need to contend with it. This is where paper eating comes into play.
If you eat a name, once you've swallowed it, you can move on to another name. This removes it from play for the rest of the game, and adds an extra layer of commitment and strategy. It inspires questions like:
It's added a lot to our enjoyment of the game, and absolutely mortifies any new friends brought into the fold.
Cue me looking at my box of very well used Monikers cards, horrified and kinda wondering if they'd taste good.
Please do NOT do this with Monikers!!
(mouth full of Monikers paper) now who would be dumb enough to do that?
For Carcasonne, I play that you have a deck of four tiles to choose from, instead of randomly placing whatever you draw. It increases strategy a bit by having you do some more tangible long term planning
We do this too, but we just use two tiles. Maybe we'll try with four next time and see how it goes.
Many years ago my group of armchair generals introduced 'diplomatic relations' to Risk. Each player starts with several scraps of paper on which they can write messages to one another proposing non-aggression treaties, coordinated strikes, or even just harmless snack runs as a means of misdirection. Best of all, these communications are private, and in no way legally-binding. It has added a pretty fun psychological element to spice up gameplay and remains a core rule at our table.
Have you ever played Diplomacy by chance?
I haven't played personally but one in our group has suggested we give it a go some afternoon when we're all sufficiently fresh and caffeinated. Am I right that the ruleset / gameplay is comparatively much more complex than Risk?
Yeah. The gameplay is quite simple, but the rules aren't particularly intuitive. They aren't complicated, per se, but there will certainly be a lot of questions about how rules interact. Fortunately, the rulebook contains a bunch of common situations, which helps.
Your friend probably already mentioned this, but Diplomacy is basically like if the whole game revolved around your house rule. It is awesome.
We'd play the same way! The mechanical rules of the Risk game are in stone, but anything goes in the social sphere - alliances, treaties, betrayals, misdirection etc. Lots of feelings got hurt, haha. Man, those were the days.
Power Grid: Play with open money. Technically not a house rule, but because the FAQ/game designer said that money should be hidden, it's something we clarify before we begin. We also sometimes use some of the updated rules from Power Grid: Recharged - specifically the pre-chosen starting locations, and making the cheapest plant cost $1 at the beginning of the auction. I like the pre-chosen starting locations, though I've found that the $1 plant doesn't make a huge difference.
I'm surprised that the cheapest power plant being $1 isn't a major game changer. I would have expected that to churn through the market much faster.
I didn't explain it very well, but here's the rule, and it only applies during the setup for the auction each round, so if it gets bought, the discount doesn't go to another plant until you've gone through a full turn cycle:
I think it doesn't change much because if it's a plant worth buying, the auction will bring it back in line with the other plants, and if it's not worth buying, no one wants to waste their bid/money on it.
For less experienced players if someone is really far behind, it can act as a catch-up mechanism since it might only be worth it to them, but my playgroup plays pretty tight, so everyone tends to not want that plant at the same point in the game.
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!
Other "House" rule: win or lose on the table, you must never lose the meta game - don't be a dick, don't gloat excessively, absolutely no trash talking, pay attention to your fellow player's emotional wellbeing, but you can't emotionally manipulate others into giving you an advantage either.
Not that this needs to be a rule everywhere all the time, but at least in this house it's important. It's like the "play many rounds" condition for the prisoners dilemma tournaments.
For Catan we house rule that if you don't get a resource in five rolls then you get one free chosen resource. Doubt it's balanced, but frankly snowballing in Catan annoys me the most and I don't care about that level of intricacy, so... No complaints from me.
For Medium, if you're not going and the other players botch the first guess then you write a word down on every other player's second or third turn. If you match with the players or someone else at the table you get a point.
It's the base game that isn't balanced--I think your house rule is pretty much necessary to correct for the game's snowballing bias.
A way less serious (but fantastically fun) one for Catan is the Kaiju rule. A mate of mine developed this. You set up the board with the desert in the centre. The robber is now a kaiju. Every 7 that gets rolled, the Kaiju moves one hex closer to the coast (player rolling the first 7 chooses the direction). Any road the Kaiju crosses is destroyed and must be rebuilt. The game ends with no winner if the Kaiju reaches the sea before someone gets 10 points.
Fun idea, but won't it always reach the coast before someone scores 10 points?
Depends how often a 7 gets rolled. I think they may have allowed sideways movement, but I don't remember exactly.
Does it destroy all roads around the tile it moves to, or just the road on the adjacent edge?
Just the adjacent edge. There may have been a mechanic for destroying cities and towns as well, but I don't remember exactly.
We add in that if you roll a 7, and the robber is not on the desert, you can move him to the desert and take a resource of your choice from the supply. It opens up the board, makes the game faster, and helps prevent snowballs.
We have done a similar rule to yours: on your turn if you haven't gotten a resource since your last turn, then you can take one resource of your choice. Again, it mitigates the bad luck, snowballs, and keeps the game rolling. (edit: I realized this is basically exactly your rule if there are 4 players, ie. your last turn, the intervening 3 turns, and your current turn == five turns)
Basic Catan is so slow, that we have implemented another house role, which is that we don't play it unless my in-laws are here.
Having played the more recent expansions, it’s always fascinating seeing what design decisions they’ve put in place to mitigate issues that exist in the base game.
For this example, in the Explorers And Pirates expansion, they have gold coins as a separate resource. Every turn that the dice are rolled, if you don’t get a resource, you get a gold coin. Gold coins aren’t cards, so they’re not affected by “roll 7, lose half” so they’re sort of an insurance policy too. At any time during your turn, you can trade two coins with the bank for one card of your choice, but limited to two trades per turn. So you can bank up loads of coins, but you can only spend up to four coins per turn, so it’s a nudge to keep things moving without giving explosive turns.
We always did no bandits on the first round, sometimes the first two. Nothing sucks more than having a stack of resources in your hands in the first turn and rolling a 7.
The snowball in Catan is quite strong so it can be difficult to come back from not building in turn 1.
That kind of is a down side of Catan: if your early game sucks there's nothing you can do other than slowly lose for the next two hours.
I have seen games turn around completely. The dice gods can be fickle.
Histories: Rise of the Inkas has some mechanics that can prevent snowballing. It's worth a play for Catan fans.
It's also generally a bit of a bad game, but it's easy and feels good when you do grow.
Other than that, it's fiercely mediocre compared to more modern boardgames.
I'm so happy my in-laws like to play Wingspan.
Our house rule is robber isn't in play until someone has more than the two starting points, not including victory cards. If you role a 7, you role again.
I might have to try that Catan rule... Do you need to declare what resource you're going for and then wait five of your rolls or is it five overall rolls?
Nah, any resource of your choosing on #5 if five people go in a row and you don't get any resources out of any of them.
Since grade 9 our various groups of friends have always played UNO with stacking and cuts, official rules be darned.
I assume we're all familiar with stacks and cuts?
If someone attacks you with a +4, they have to call a colour and you can pass or reverse as above, if your card is the called colour.
Play is paused when someone picks up, usually 20+ cards in hand. They get to play the first card to resume play.
On your turn you can play any number of cards of the same type (eg blue 8, red 8, twenty green 8s) at the same time, provided the bottom card matches number or colour
On NOT your turn you can cut in with any number of cards as well, provided the bottom card is exactly the same as the current card to be played, and you shout CUT really loudly. Except when play is paused cuz someone is picking up.
You can finish your hand and win on black or stack of same number cards.
It's best played with 8+ people and multiple stacks of UNO. The play style is suited for extremely short rounds with extremely large number pick ups and there's nearly always something to cut in if you pay attention. -- recesses are very short and you gotta maximize the time.
UNO is a slow and boring game otherwise.
My houserules for Uno are:
The last point adds a layer of tactic to the last card. You can prevent an automatic win with with a black card as the last card by playing a black card yourself and force the player to play a coloured card.
Our house rules for Uno are:
-you cannot stack a draw two on a draw four or vice versa.
I play with that cut-in rule and it was a big break room hit, but I loathe draw stacking! That was the dominant house rule when I was a kid and everyone just stockpiles their draw cards defensively for the inevitable big stack that dumps a ton of cards on one player. Play slows down and now that the "interesting" cards are all exhausted, time to just plod through number cards.
I'd liken it to picking all of the meat out of a stew. It's nice for a moment, but its absence makes the rest worse.
By-the-book Uno isn't slow. Maybe if you're playing to 500 points it is, but a single round of 4 players shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes.
It's "slower" though, isn't it?
By the book UNO means only one player gets to put down one card at a time: in a circle of 10+ kids, 9 of them have nothing to do at any given moment. Recess is only 15 minutes long, plus putting books away and getting new books and meeting at that one wing and enough time to walk to the next class -- the asynchronous thrill of being able to throw down a card or even clear your entire hand at any time is hard to beat.
It's the difference between vs multiplayer speed.
Also why board games like Lord's of Waterdeep and 7 Wonders work so well: turns are asynchronous.
But add the 0, where everyone hands their deck to the next person, and 7, the person who played it can choose who they want to swap with, it takes a while to go through a single round. And coupled with the home rule of stacking the +2 and +4's then make sure you have an hour or more to play.
we sometimes play, that whoewer finnishes the game declares a new rule. so the longer we play the more rules there are.
rules can be whatever you want them to. so i can be cuts are now allowed or can be anything else, like all red cards when played must as well be declared in a foreign language. or everytime somebody plays a two everybody needs to stand up/sit down. it can get very funny and absurd very fast :-)
I can highly recommend to play like this with fun, creative people and some drinks.
Do you allow deliberately picking up a card even if you have a legal card in your hand at that time?
oh good question! I forgot about this house rule. No, it's not allowed -- if you have a card and you don't play it, someone could challenge, failed challenge or legit challenge = 7 cards penalty. Makes for extra fun "bluff" purposes.
did you guys play with this house rule?
Not only did we always play with this house rule, I didn't even know it was a house rule until very recently! It's possible I cheated at Uno a lot when I played at school haha
That's an extra cool addition to it, though, for us it was just a thing you could do no questions asked, but adding in the challenge is awesome.
Ahh, I think that's why we added the "if you can play you must play" rule. Extra fun when teenage boyfriend/girlfriend is forced to add to the stack that ends up for their little friend muhahahahaa
In Avalon we do secret votes for who will go on missions (we put the tiles in a bag and shake them up) but you can choose to vote publicly for emphasis or as a form of manipulation.
Most of the people I play with tend to play by the book, but we do have some house rules. The first, and typical house rule for DnD 5e. Drinking a potion is a bonus action. Administering one to another character is an action. It removes the rogue's "fast hands" ability, but we typically patch that up a different way if it comes up.
My Magic Commander group doesn't have extra banned cards or "sorcery speed scooping only" but we do require follow through. If player A says, "I can kill Player B by attacking" and Player B starts scooping up cards, player A still has to make the attack, because they get exposed to potential counterattacks by other players.
In addition to your rule about healing potions, my players don't have a healer so I made a rule where using an action to drink a healing potion gives you the max amount for hit points, whereas a bonus action you roll for it. The in game flavoring is that the action you take the time to drink the whole thing while the bonus action you're kinda just throwing it in your face.
I fucking love Cards against Humanity, to the point that I have a bunch of expansions, and also a number of 'Crabs Adjust Humidity' 3rd party expansions mixed in as well.
All of these extra cards available have led to a few house rules which I really enjoy, mostly centered on improving the average quality hand anyone has at a given time.
Any time you draw a card, you actually draw 2 cards and select your favorite. This also includes the prompt card, so people don't feel as stuck with a lame prompt as happens in the base game sometimes.
Total hand size is 10 at all times.
Whenever a round is complete (it's gone around the table once), everyone is allowed to discard and replace (1-to-1) any number of cards in their hand.
To me, the overall humor level in the game is a lot higher if everyone has better options.
Yeah, Cards is good for this. We have:
When you draw your black card, you select two and pick the one you like better.
You can discard one of your trophy black cards to discard any number of cards in your hand and draw back up to 10.
If you straight-up don't understand a white card, you're allowed to SHAME! it. You read it out loud, we all either rib on the person who doesn't get it or are collectively like "wow that's stupid", then they discard it and draw another.
Making awkward or situationally-funny white cards is part of the fun IMO, but sometimes you need just a bit of flexibility so you're not looking at the same mitt of bad stuff the whole game.
In complex cooperative board games (ex: Spirit Island), I like playing with house rules that ensure full knowledge at the end of a turn, because then it turns into strict min/maxing instead of hedging. In Spirit Island in particular, that means turning over the enemy's action card at the start of the player turn, so that you can put exactly the right number of tokens on a square to exactly combat the action the enemies will take without risk of them getting a turn that imbalances it and screws you over. I figure for some people, that random bad luck makes the game more engaging, but I don't like it.
We double the number of points before a game of Ascension is over. Otherwise, you barely get time to build your deck before it's over!
Yes, this does sometimes result in hilariously OP loops. We love it.
No getting turned into a toad in Talisman board game i.e. D&D Lite™ (especially if you made custom cards). If that were to happen, you would lose:
This was often the equivalent of dying and having to wait 3 turns to rejoin with little to no chance of winning. And possibly actually dying in that time, as the toad is weak and can't cast spells. I don't remember what we replaced it with, but it wasn't worse than death.
Not only it was frustrating, but also perplexing. I understand not being able to carry stuff, but losing followers felt mean. Surely they'd continue traveling with the toad for 3 turns? Or keep it safely in a jar?
Alchorally/Robohole is a drinking game variant on Roborally. Our main innovation is that you drink when you shoot and when you reach one of the goal posts. This has the added benefit of evening out the game. Good players becomes worse as the game progresses allowing the others to catch up.
In rummy, our house rules are that an ace can be played on a run either before a two, after a king, or even wrap around (so a king-ace-two is a valid run). Given that everyone has the same chances of making that happen, it isn't as if it gives an unfair advantage, and honestly just makes the game more fun.
We also score at the end by giving aces 15 points, face cards 10 points, and the number cards are 5 points each. We don't usually keep a running score though, we just play it hand by hand.
Same, but we play “if you play A-2-3, the ace is worth 5 even if you stick a king on the front of it later”
Dune: Imperium - The Sand Worm eats cards. I specifically sought out this rule because I felt there wasn't enough churn in the card market.
Valley of the Kings: Afterlife - errata Goddess Nut and Dagger to cost 5. These cards give you massive buying power and really should not be available to just Shabti + buy with starter cards. We also considered making them cost 6, but 5 has felt OK.
Not really a house rule, but playing charades with the cards from Cards Against Humanity is fun. The person who guesses the card gets to keep it to keep score and has to act it out next. But honestly, it is also a bunch of fun without keep track of the score.