Day 251: House rules
It’s Games and Puzzles Day!
Today’s Activity: Add your own rules to make your board games more fun.
We’ve added a house rule to In A Pickle that’s made the game a lot smoother (though to be fair, silly arguments are half the fun of the game). If you play a dodgy card and have to argue for its validity, a skeptical player can give you “the benefit of the doubt,” a physical token you hold onto until it’s handed off to someone else on a subsequent questionable turn. For reasons I don’t quite remember, said token is usually a small orange. But the key thing is that you can’t be given the benefit of the doubt when you already have it, so it improves the distribution of extremely silly plays.
This Reddit thread has some wild suggestions for house rules, including turning Risk into a semi-Pandemic-style zombie game, using Uno cards instead of dice to move around the Monopoly board, and simply being allowed to complain when someone’s taking too long on their turn in Settlers of Catan.
Here’s a longer thread with some more strategic tweaks actually intended to improve the game.
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Catch up on earlier Games and Puzzles days:
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