House Rules

Scott Hardie | February 22, 2015
Do you have any custom rules for board games or card games when you play?

The two most common examples are both from Monopoly: Skipping the auction when someone declines to buy the property they just landed on, and putting all money paid to the bank into a pot be collected by whoever lands on Free Parking. (Game purists will argue that both of these common "rules" have a detrimental effect on the game, and that's true but it misses the various benefits that they offer, not the least of which is making the game palatable for people who just don't enjoy it the traditional way.)

Scott Hardie | June 18, 2015
Last Night on Earth is a pretty good zombie game, but it has many overly complex rules that threaten to get in the way of the fun. For instance, it includes very specific rules about how the players are to divvy up the townspeople and zombies in a "balanced" way, such as two players each controlling half of the zombies while two other players control two townspeople, which is confusing and limits how many people can participate. In our experience, the game always works best when one player controls the zombies and everyone else controls a single townsperson fighting to survive, no matter how many people are at the table. That's how we usually play it, and we haven't had a bad time yet. I'm tempted to trim a bunch of the other rules just to see if it improves the game further.

Scott Hardie | July 11, 2015
Kelly's biggest pet peeve in games is when they end suddenly with no warning, when one player achieves victory out of the blue. That factor mars the otherwise excellent Chrononauts, a card game where someone wins when a specific combination of cards is face-up or face-down on the table. We have made it a policy to call out "uno" when you're one card away from victory, as in another game, so that other players have a chance to do something about it or at least to have some warning that the end is nigh.