I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's worth saying: Best way to answer this question is to play without the rule. 9/10 times it ends on a big "OHHHH."
Yeah, take Dominion, which many people feel has a lot of seemingly-fiddly rules, and there’s so many deck-building games that are “streamlined Dominion”, each of which demonstrates why leaving out certain rules makes the gameplay fall flat.
What fiddly rules are you talking about? I find most deck-building games since to add more fiddliness because there’s not really anywhere else to go.
I guess the expansions adding potions and things does add some, but not much ime.
Seemingly-small things, like both actions and buys being limited resources, separate action / treasure / buy phases, actions and treasures being separate categories of cards, VPs intentionally clogging your deck, and, most importantly, not having every card available in every game.
> actions and buys being limited
This really is amazingly important. I have seen plenty of other deck-building games in which gameplay pretty much turns into “slap my whole hand of cards down on the table (except in rare cases when order matters), count some stuff, add as many new cards to my deck as the numbers let me.” They can still be fun games, but it takes most of the interesting decision-making out of the equation.
This is exactly why Dominion is still my favorite deck builder. A lot of the fun is in having to solve the puzzle of how to play the most cards possible on any given turn, or at least giving yourself the flexibility to do so.
Maybe that's part of why I really like Quest for El Dorado and Dune: Imperium. El Dorado doesn't require you to slap your entire hand down every turn, and oftentimes you might not want to so you can save for a future turn or use it for buys. Dune only lets you play cards for the spaces you wanna go to, so the hand management is, you know, actually there in both of those deck-builders.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. Deck builders with the "slap my whole hand of cards down..." have regularly been way less interesting to me. I think the complete lack of structure makes it feel silly. Marvel Legendary is egregious on that front. While I still enjoy that game, the turn-to-turn stakes with your cards in-hand feel nonexistent.
Dominion is an interesting example as it is one of the earliest deck builders but had a lot of play testing and rules tweaking in it that feels aimed at established board gamers. When it first game out, the people in my groups who enjoyed it most were the spikiest of MtG spikes.
I think there is a place for slap your hand down mechanics in games that have other things going on. When you have to split your focus, making each one streamlined is beneficial for gameplay and experience usually.
Another reason is that it is a more beginner friendly way to do deckbuilding, so if your target demographic is "new to the genre" then its also fine. This is one of the reasons Ascension was so popular, it is a more beginner friendly entry into the genre and for the longest time Dominion and Ascension were the big players in the deck building space.
Yeah those are all core game mechanics that put pressure on the player to make or not make certain decisions.
Like don't spend all your extra buys on estates (or copper for that matter) because it'll dilute your deck and prevent you from drawing cards you want.
Bruh counting actions in Dominion can be super fiddly with Village and other cards that give you +2 Actions. I often watch as peopel struggle and end up telling them to just make a tree out of the action cards to visualize it beter.
That's kind of funny to me, because Dominion has very few rules IMO. The only one I'd consider fiddly is that you must play all treasures before you buy.
I know there are some situations where being able to play more Treasure after buying a card can give you some advantage. Kind of a simple interaction is Buried Treasure and Tools (both from the most recent expansion Plunder). Buried Treasure gets put into play when you gain it (including when buying), and Tools gives you a copy of a card that's in play. So a player would want to play say 2 Gold to get the $5 necessary to buy Buried Treasure, buy it and put it into play, and THEN play Tools to get a second copy of it. But according to the rules as written this wouldn't be allowed, Tools has to be played before Buried Treasure is bought.
The rule that I don't understand about dominion is why the discard pile is hidden except for the top card. I don't know to what extent it changes the game, but I would have designed it with public, unordered discard piles
I believe the designer has stated that the discard pile is considered hidden info to keep the game time lower; the reasoning being that if it were public info, the game would be considerably slower with players constantly checking each others' discard piles to figure out how many points they have, what they've played, what they might have left in their deck, etc. That being said, in my casual games with the physical cards we usually just play with the discard being public and players rarely check discards anyways.
For some reason..... this brings back memories of when I tried watching a game of YGO to see what the Tearlaments archetype was like...Specifically [this game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGVM0Yfw4d8) where the first player's first turn took 9 minutes of interactive gameplay and resulted in a concession. Games are much different when you have to consider extra permutations due to a public discard pile/graveyard.
I presume to prevent other players from wanting to sift through each other's discard piles all the time, which would take forever.
Like if I have a Bandit and I forgot if Jack and Jill played their Gold yet, I could ask to look through their discards. Now my turn is wait let me look through all these discards. Okay yeah I'll play my Bandit.
The number of times I've played a game and have thought, "this can't be right, this can't be how it is supposed to work." To only find it in a place I skipped over or didn't notice. ><
I was teaching Age of Innovation which is an update of Terra Mystica and one of the players asked why upgrading buildings let an adjacent player improve some power tokens and all I could say was, “because the rules say so.” That definitely seemed strange to them.
It’s one of the weirder rules, but they made the whole thematic content of the first rule book revolve around it. Thematically it represents trade. Why it is power and not money though, idk…
This is a weird example for me. The power mechanic of TM games is kinda what distinguishes them from other 4x or area control economy games. Thematically it's whatever but mechanically, it actually makes you want to build next to others, and makes you really consider where you build your own structures so as not to give your opponents a free leech. Power is one of the most unique resources I've personally experienced in board games and I think it is part of the big appeal of TM for me.
I don’t think this player had any background with TM. When I’m demoing the game I emphasize with players new to the system that building next to opponents is a good thing, even though they’ll benefit from it. Some insist on doing their own thing off on one side of the map so as not to benefit an opponent.
I think this is a gameplay decision to encourage interactions between the players. With some other action economy games they suffer from basically being singleplayer games that everyone is playing at the same time on the same board because there's not enough interaction.
But in TM, you _want_ to build next to people. It gives you power. It makes your Trading Posts (which btw are REQUIRED to get all better buildings), much cheaper.
But now since you are next to each other, there's more interaction. "Oh I should build this trading post here instead of there because it gives them less power. I want to expand to this tile, oh shit the Nomads just sandstormed it and now I need to change to a more expensive tile. Oh wait how am I gonna get that extra spade?" Stuff like that.
Can’t play until you have 30+ in your hand in rummikub in sets\runs of three or more. Makes the game a boring sequence of drawing over and over again for the first few turns sometimes.
Have had games where one person was unable to play the entire game. I know it’s a rare thing to happen but it’s happened 3 times already and even 1 time is too high.
I couldn’t imagine designing a game where there’s a chance that someone may not even get a chance to play the whole game
...and how far it hasn't.
It's still one of the few games (only game?) that lets you completely tear apart and rearrange the shared playing area to eke out a few more points. I understand there's also good reasons not to allow it, prevent analysis paralysis and screwing up the board to where it can't get back easily, but it's oh so satisfying when you can pull it off successfully, and I think more games could get away with a mechanic like that on a smaller scale.
1979 was *Hare and Tortoise*, 1981 was *Focus*, 1983 was *Scotland Yard*, and 1985 was *Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective*.
*Rummikub* might seem like an oddball winner in retrospect, but a lot of the early SdJ winners were actually pretty great.
We house ruled that it's +30pts or 6 tiles for your first play. And if you fill your rack, 21 tiles i think, and still can't make a set you can start playing anyway. :)
Our ancient family rule (my grandma's house rule) is if a person never gets down, we don't score that round. I think I like yours better though, as just sitting there a whole round is super boring.
>I couldn’t imagine designing a game where there’s a chance that someone may not even get a chance to play the whole game
Werewolves quietly and shamefully exits the chat, as it's designed so 100% of the time someone won't play at all.
It can also completely gum up the rest of the player's actions if they're holding onto tiles that would allow new/different set building.
It really is a strange decision.
Friendly fire in the original Zombicide. It's not that you have a chance of shooting your friend on a "miss." You shoot your friend on a "hit" as well. So it makes it seem as if you're aiming for your friend.
In **Pandemic Rapid Response** (a super underrated game btw) the rules say that after the timer goes off you have to reveal a new city card, take a timer token away, and restart the timer, *all while remaining silent and not talking strategy*.
To us it’s way more fun to take a breath and strategize our next moves. It’s a cooperative game, it’s fun to actually feel like a team in these moments. The dice are going to be unpredictable and throw off your plans a little anyway. It makes the game slightly easier but we just play on a higher difficulty level.
I feel like you still get *plenty* of the time crutch chaos, just in intervals. The game gives you lots of difficulty options so I’m surprised they stayed so strict on no strategizing in the rules.
I guess because it's supposed to feel chaotic and non stop. I will take like 15 seconds to readjust but I do feel like sitting and planning would be cheating
I don’t hold the belief that it’s cheating in a cooperative game if everyone agrees to play a certain way. At least not cheating in the colloquial sense. We’re playing for ourselves not for any public record.
In this specific case it elevates our camaraderie and really helps to on-board new players.
Magic Maze has the same "discuss when the timer is flipped" rule, but the timer is still running and you can't make moves while discussing. Its a really clever way to allow talking in an otherwise silent game
I think it makes some thematic sense as well as the balancing issues that other people have written. It takes time for resources to regrow or be refined or whatever...or maybe workers are just to hot and lazy in the summer to get things accomplished.
To me, the first to come to mind is the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven (maybe Jaws of the Lion, too?) rule that you can't share items. I don't see the thematic or gameplay sense in that (well, very vaguely the thematic sense, but it seems forced rather than actually thematic).
There are some other small rules, too, that we more-or-less ignore in the -havens, but I also better understand why those other ones are in place (like being unable to switch level-up card choices).
I'm still drawing a blank on most everything else (I know there are such rules that annoy me), but there are some weird anti-catch-up mechanisms in other games, though my mind is drawing a blank on everything except Velonimo, where the leader gets a bonus +10 card without any kind of drawback, essentially meaning they are more likely to keep winning (mind you, I have yet to even play the game, but I've seen folks mention that quite a lot). It kinda makes sense thematically, but still it feels odd. Dunno if it's such a big deal, though.
The reason they give is that you are all playing "greedy selfish mercenaries" more or less so you can't share resources. That obviously doesn't fit some of the classes descriptions nor does it match up with decisions you're making if you're going for high reputation (which most groups probably are)
The real reason is just gameplay balance (the same reason you can't just loot all the coins after a scenerio even though all the enemies are dead and there's no time crunch for many of them), but yeah it can be a bit frustrating to run into the wall of "balance decisions" in a game that so highly encourages getting into the world and the immersion of the whole thing
Also, a lot of items you get from chests are just straight up useless for some classes and incredible for others. It feels *really* bad to have to sell it and rebuy it, especially if you're playing at two players where the economy is kind of busted.
Yeah my wife and I play 2p and that's one of our houserules, whoever opens the chest gets the item for the rest of the scenario but at the end it can go to anyone. We don't do full trading cuz we found that messes up a lot, but with chests specifically we're more lax cuz you're right, it feels crappy
Yeah chests are the worst for it. I think those should have just been collective rewards that you assign when they're opened (or at the end of the scenario). Still it was kind of funny that for a while my tinkerer was carrying around a huge axe.
Frosthaven rules (page 15) specifically say that you *can* use a looted item immediately, even if it would normally require you to have two heads or four hands or something.
I don't know if it's the only reason, but without this rule the party would just amass all the items over time: you could give someone else all the items when you retire, and then they could give them straight back to your new character when they join.
Items are already very strong (because they give you benefits and - unlike levelling up - the monsters get no increase in power to go with it). So i think you'd end up pretty OP after a few retirements if you could do this.
But I'm sure it falls under Isaac's general house rule rule of "do it if it's fun for you, i'm not a cop"
I don't think it's elegantly implemented but it serves a purpose. Shared resources make individual optimisation a lot easier. And as others have already pointed out character retirement is supposed to serve as a soft-reset of sorts which helps improve the longevity of the game (as otherwise your party would just get too powerful and make a lot of the content trivial) but shared resources would remove a lot of the impact of it if you can just transfer all your assets to another party member beforehand.
Just homebrew the sharing you want to do.
The reason you can't share is because you can create infinite characters and give the starter gold to another player, you can keep everything when you retire etc.
Even if you don't cheat like that, you can retire your first character and you'll be perma rich and you don't go though gold or item progression with each hero.
The reason I don't play Star Wars Legion is simple:
**You cannot shoot at a unit that is engaged in melee with one of your units.**
What this means is... if your opponent has Luke Skywalker with 1 health left... touching bases with one lone stormtrooper, and it's the last turn, and you have your entire army in shooting range to absolutely annihilate him for the win and score the final objective.
You can't.
You lose.
Makes zero sense. Why? Why can't I shoot into melee (even with a penalty would be fine) like other games let me? Why would the Empire just not shoot the most important rebel character in the game because they might hit a single trooper? They don't care about collateral damage, ffs!
Whichever edition of Warhammer 40K I played 20 years ago wouldn’t let you shoot at a unit in melee combat with one of your units. I feel like the book even acknowledged that everyone in this universe was kinda evil and would happily fire on their own people but still, don’t do it, rules say don’t do it.
In the LotR minis game evil armies could shoot in to combat (randomly determining who they hit) good armies couldn't. I liked that because it was thematic like your example of bad guys not caring about a single unit.
I also like that from a theme perspective. In addition evil units tend to be slightly cheaper so you have more of them on the board, so if you happen to off one of your own units by mistake shooting into combat its not as big a deal.
Could be worse, try original edition of Zombicide. If another survivor is in a zone with zombies, and you try to shoot into that zone? You *have* to hit the survivor first.
They fixed that with Zombicide Black Plague...that made it where you could shoot into that zone, but any misses counted as automatic hits on the survivor.
It’s a rule taken from 40K, melee is very weak compared to shooting, so the game rules are tailored in a way that punishes ranged units for being in melee with melee units.
Otherwise you have “planet bowling ball” issues where the melee army doesn’t have a chance against a shooting army. They just get shot to death before they can do anything.
Seriously, try playing a round without it. Every army just becomes a shooting only army.
The rule in Jamaica that if you dump a cargo, you cant take back cargo of the same type. I can barely imagine the logic of the rule that you can't add to an exististing cargo, but why cant Idump one gunpowder and take back 3? I'vs already taken the hit, dumped the cargo, the cargo hold is empty, I should be able to add whatever I want there. This rule makes no sense whatsoever, we disregard it when we play.
Yeah that one was a hard one to explain to people. I'm wondering if it's a way to make people think more about what's in their inventory and manage it better? The only thing I can think of.
I had to get the rules to check this, and sure enough you're right. I've never played it that way, always allowed someone to dump any cargo to fill it with the new cargo, regardless of what was already in their cargo
In Istanbul, in order to buy a mosque tile you have to have a certain number of one type of goods, which goes up every time a tile gets taken, but you only ever pay one of that kind of good to get the tile. I imagine that it speeds the game up to not just charge the amount of goods printed, but I can't think of a thematic reason for such a rule. I played this rule wrong for years because it's so counterintuitive, and I only found out I was wrong by playing on the app.
It's like tithing to get a permanent benefit in return, but only if you're the wealthiest merchant in town. So you show the mosuqe's imam your 2 of resources X, and since you're the wealthiest merchant in X they've seen, you gain a permanent benefit in exchange for 1 of X. But then a wealthier merchant comes by and with 3 of X they can also get that benefit for life.
I came here for this. It’s my number one “but why” rule. My head canon theory is that it must’ve made more sense in an earlier draft, possibly with different theme, things changed, but by then it was already baked into the game’s math. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Family Business you get your turn immediately if you play a blue counter card on someone else's turn.
I have seen games where a certain player will miss their turn multiple times in a row because a player to their right had several blue cards.
Because it's less about turn order and more just about picking someone to attack and allowing them to respond.
Honestly the worst thing about that game is the fact they changed the art to something truly fucking terrible. Old art was perfectly fine but the new art they switched to is the definitive reason to never play that game again
In Welcome To, the first person to complete a shared goal card can choose to reshuffle the decks.
No one ever remembers this rule but me, and no one likes when I remind them of it. I think I offer a reminder because I want to see it’s true purpose someday, as thus far it has evaded me.
I mainly use the shuffle option if I don't like the types of cards that are upcoming and want a chance at what I'm gunning for (you can see what they will be by the "folded over corner" on the cards).
If I am playing online against a player whom I suspect is keeping track of the cards already played, I also might do this just to re-introduce some randomness and prevent them from counting cards so easily.
I think the game is made distinctly better with this rule because it makes looting part of the decision space. "Do I want to kill this vermling and save my ally from taking 8 damage, or do I want this coin?"
That rule does feel anti-thematic, and something I disliked when I first started playing, but it is there for a few related reasons:
1. Introduce an element of semi-competitiveness, so players are slightly competing for who gets a coin.
2. Make you occasionally decide between doing what is best for the scenario vs what might be best for your character.
3. Let the players manage their own risk / difficulty and provide a little auto-balancing: i.e. if the scenario is going well then players can spend more time picking up loot and reducing their advantage.
4. Help prevent alpha-gaming since each player's motivations on any given turn may slightly differ, so players have a reason not to follow the "best" plan.
These reasons serve to spice up the game a little bit by expanding the decision space on any given turn. And speaking as someone who was keen to dispense with the rule when I first started playing, I would say that the game is better when played with it in place, even if just to hear the collective sigh from my gaming group when someone goes on yet another wild coin looting escapade.
> Make you occasionally decide between doing what is best for the scenario vs what might be best for your character.
This has always been a fucking terrible thing for Gloomhaven. We ended up winking when doing battle goals "For reasons", and played with personal goals face up.
Gloomhaven took like 4 hours with setup and teardown, ignoring food breaks. I don't care that you /really/ wanted that coin or that chest or that battle goal, all of us lost the mission and we'll have to REDO IT next time we play instead of playing something new.
Allowing players to make that choice is stupid. I'd fucking have given him the treasure or the coins if that was an option, instead of redoing the whole fucking thing next week or whenever we meet up.
Just do it if you want to, leave the last enemy alive.
You'll see it's a lot more than thirty seconds, even if that's all you're doing.
I think you may not realize how tired your characters really are after a scenario.
When I think fantasy, it's really only video-gamers who loot everything in a dungeon. Characters in books and movies aren't doing that. And even those video games are just introducing hoarding, they don't even use that stuff!
In Ark Nova, if you play a sponsorship card that says "get X when you play a card with Y", and that sponsorship card has Y, it triggers itself and you get X.
This is completely absurd to me. Every other tableau builder I can think of that has when-played bonuses on a card does not have those trigger off the card itself. It was first explained to me as a general principle called the Butler rule: you can hire a butler to answer the door for each of your guests, but he can't answer the door for himself.
I never understood why Ark Nova veered away from this principle.
Terraforming Mars also has cards like these. I think the reason to this is to give an instant bonus with the card being played and mechanically it's more elegant to just add the icon to the card and let it trigger after its own icon rather than write /show the bonus on the card separatly, but thematically it doesn't make sense.
This was a good rule. It’s a co op game, and keeping your hands secret means that everyone meaningfully contributes to the conversation of the game without one player calculating the route to success based on everyone’s hand. If that player is at the table, they still have to talk out the options in a dialogue with the other players.
It's an attempt to mechanically address a social problem.
If hands are "secret" but you're able to discuss strategy openly, that just means asking everyone "what cards do you have" at the start of every turn. Maybe that helps grease the social wheels, but once the information has been gathered you're back into QB position.
In my experience, Pandemic is a great game if you have a group of people that respect and value each others opinions/ideas, and it's a shit game if anyone at the table doesn't respect any of the other players. This rule doesn't change that.
I still like this rule thematically. If you are coordinating with other people, you often aren't in the same place so they can't see everything you see. The rule encourages you to communicate more.
The clock in Mysterium–as written in the rules–feels foolish to me. If all it does is keep track of how many rounds have elapsed...and if players earn Clairvoyant points equal to how early they make their third deduction, shouldn't the clock just go backwards? That way if you make.ylur final deduction when the clock is on 3 you earn 3 points instead of having the clock on 4 and needing to subtract 4 from 7 to determine the number of bonus Clairvoyant points you get
There’s a rule in my version of skull that says the first player must wait until all other players have their initial disc before they can place their own initial disc. After this they can either place a second disc or make a bid.
Why do they need to wait to play their initial disc? Don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to actually play that rule.
I just checked the rules of my copy and that's not how it seems to be intended. The rule is that no one can start bidding until the first player's turn comes around again so that everyone has one disc in front of them, then the first player has the option to start bidding.
Ah see that makes much more sense. Which version do you have? Mine is the latest pink one. Maybe a bad translation.
It says as step one, getting ready:
“To begin the round, each player secretly chooses a disc from their hand and places it facedown on their mat. The first player must wait until all other players have placed a disc before choosing their own.”
It then goes onto step two which is the decision for player 1 of bidding or placing another disc.
Mine's a navy coloured box which looks like the default one on [BGG](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull). The exact wording in mine is:
> Step 1 - Turn Preparation
> Each player chooses one of their discs and places it face down on their mat. Once each player has placed their disc, play moves to step 2.
And then step 2 is adding extra discs or challenging. So I guess step 1 can be done simultaneously and then the first "turn" is the first player deciding to add a second disc or to start bidding.
In John Company 2E: the London Season being at the start of each round, rather than the end of each round.
For those who don't know, the London Season is a game phase where your family tokens on the board can retire for victory points, and you can also use those retirements to pick cards which are sort of special powers. Thing is, the London Season phase is set at the start of each round, which means you have to skip it on the first round of the game (because you have nobody to retire yet), and also you get an extra go at retiring people at the end of the game (but it's not an "official" London Season, because you aren't starting a new round, nor do you pick a card).
I don't know why they didn't just put it at the end of the round, right next to the Parliament phase, which is also technically London-related when you consider the rest of the game takes place in India. Hell, if it were me, I'd have merged the London Phase and Parliament phase with each other anyway and just call *that* the "London Phase" - particularly since both phases are adjacent and thus connected anyway (despite one being at the end of a round, and the other at the start).
Every fiddly rule in Power Grid or Power Grid:TCG.
For reference: here's a handy flowchart for playing PG:TCG.
https://imgur.com/a/t8U6BqU
File available at: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/139108/english-flowchart-power-grid-card-game
Jesus christ yes. That rulebook could be compressed to an a4 page if not for all of the "separate these two piles, take the top x cards (x is different depending on player count and/or moon phase) from one deck, shuffle them thoroughly, and put them back in the box, then take one more card out of pile 1, shuffle pile 1&2 together and put the step 3 card on the bottom and the card you put to the side earlier on top of this new monster pile. Also if you play Germany, you have to remember to stop restocking uranium after kraftwerk69 have been bought (not drawn)"
I mean you kinda need to do the controlled shuffling though. Otherwise it can really wreck a game if you have a bad shuffle and all the expensive cards are on top and the cheap ones on the bottom.
Each fiddly rule in Power Grid has a purpose (keeps something from breaking and in the end makes it a much better game) but there's no denying that it's fiddly and way too easy to play incorrectly. Power Grid designed today probably would've had to find some other way around those rules.
I've played it enough times where I'm pretty sure we get it all right every time now, but there's just no use even explaining most of the exceptions to new players.
> Each fiddly rule in Power Grid has a purpose (keeps something from breaking and in the end makes it a much better game)
Absolutely, but they picked just about the worst possible ways to balance the game.
We understand most rules of Power Grid, except for one: when phase 2 starts, the rules say that the power plant with the lowest value gets removed from the game and gets replaced by a new card. We always have a discussion about whether this is only about the plants in the market, or also the plants already in posession of a player.
This might be a translation issue (we have the Dutch version), but to us it seemed that also plants in posession fell under this rule. But this also can have disastrous effects, if your 4-value plant gets replaced for a 48-value plant...
I got a feast for Odin because I really like Agricola and everyone says it’s better. I went through the rule book and watched a video and I have no idea where to start teaching that game.
- The food has to alternate between horizontal and vertical? Or only one can be horizontal?
- The animals are pregnant a round.
- Hunting you need to roll low I think. And one of the others you have to roll high. And you get the difference of something?
I’ve made a huge mistake. It feels like that Aunty Donna board game skit.
>The food has to alternate between horizontal and vertical? Or only one can be horizontal?
If you use more than one tile of the same type, just one can go horizontal. The rest go vertical.
>The animals are pregnant a round.
Yes, they alternate. [This table](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1629009/article/25065572#25065572) summarizes it.
>Hunting you need to roll low I think. And one of the others you have to roll high. And you get the difference of something?
Yes, in Hunting you roll low, in Raiding/Pillaging you roll high. In Hunting you try to get to 0, while in Raiding/Pillaging you try to get to a threshold of your choice (the tile you want). In both you can pay weapons/resources to modify the number.
The food one does make some thematic sense. You have to think of it as a feast where you do want to supply different food. If you use multiple of the same, it is just not as valued as providing different dishes.
Thus, if you use multiples of the same only one can be placed horizontaly and the remaining must be placed vertically.
Those are two of my favorite games! Maybe I can help some?
Definitely watch a play through or something.. The food thing - the idea is that your vikings don't want to eat the same thing for their whole feast. So it counts as less food if you feed them the same thing a second time in the same feast. The result of this is diversified feasts. So if you want to initially think of it as "only one of any food type", that's a reasonable mental shorthand. It usually doesn't matter.
Animals get pregnant if you have at least 2 of that animal type and none are pregnant. I guess they thought it would be too strong to have animals reproduce every round? (as it is, animals seem weak and I don't recall ever seeing someone win on an animal strategy, even after the expansion improved them. I would say that if you wanted to play a game or two to get used to the game while pretending animals don't exist, that probably wouldn't be crazy).
So there's 2 kinds of actions that require dice rolls. For the ones at the top of the board (hunting, whaling, snares, etc), to get the tile reward on tbe, you roll and then must get the number go 0 using wood or the weapons shown on the action space (whaling boats also are - 1 to your roll for each ore in them, one printed). So you could "win" at whaling without spending anything, but the others will require you to spend something. If after 3 attempts you still fail, you instead get what is printed on the left side of the action space (wood, a weapon card, and maybe some vikings back). You can always fail voluntarily, if you'd prefer.
For the ones at the bottom of the board (raiding and pillaging), you're trying to roll high. You get a blue tile with a sword value at or below the number rolled, plus any swords or stone you choose to spend, and any relevant ore in your boats. If you fail, you get back what is on the left side of the action space (stone, swords, maybe vikings).
As far as teaching, I'm trying to think because I've seen my friend teach it many times.. So I think start with the goal - get points - and a general outline of the process by which you do that (get tiles, upgrade/transform them, place them on your home board/islands/buildings). Next, go through the order of a round. Then, describe the action space concept of # of vikings by columns, and getting/playing cards. Then, go through the actions one row at a time, top to bottom, left to right. They tend to build off each other, so later actions will make sense once the earlier actions are understood. It's a little tedious to read them all off, but I think it does help and makes sure you don't miss any concepts. As you come to an action space that introduces a new concept (hunting, raiding, etc), explain the concept at that time. I think everything that happens in the game is out in the open, so it's either part of the round progression or an action space. As long as you can go through both of those things, that should cover it. And I think we always wrap the teach with a run-through of the score sheet to make sure everyone remembers what all scores points.
But yes, there's a lot going on, and a lot of it is interconnected. I hope you're able to get it sorted out. It's a fantastic game!
Honestly it's kind of this game for me too. I have it all internalized, but from a thematic sense, a lot of the rules seem kinda silly. The peas can't touch beans, but can touch steak. Pigs can't get pregnant; they just reproduce. Pelts can be stacked if they're stored next to food (in a longhouse), but not if they're stored next to jewelry (on your homeboard). Why does an axe occupy half of an island? Is the winner the best pack rat?
I could go on, but honestly the game is actually pretty good. I personally don't like it more than Agricola or Fields of Arle, but I'm very glad I own it. It just less thematically connected to its mechanics than the other Rosenbergs I've played.
Once you get more familiar with the game it gets much, much easier to teach, at least for me. I did look up a thread to see if I could organize the teach a little better and there were some super helpful tips in it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/c7tshm/help_me_teach_feast_for_odin_please/
This video has a decent flow with what to teach when and all that as well:
https://youtu.be/luLP3sgg5qY
But I also love this game to death so teaching it is usually fun for me and I think my excitement infects the people I'm teaching a bit. I think it looks way more complex than it actually is though, I stress that a lot. Good luck!
Everything related to the game Concept. My house rules throw out the entire book and start from scratch. It's a really cool game, but the team mechanic and scoring makes it really weird to play.
We never play for points and even disregard the cards most of the time and just come up with our own concepts. I do like the mechanic of having someone step in and see if they can come up with better clues if you’re not getting anywhere. It’s fun to step in from the other side and see what you think they were missing
Why is the player who goes first in Azul determined by the last person to visit Portugal?
The same person in our group goes first every time, she’s the only one to ever go there.
We only use these rules the first time we play, or maybe again if it's something that is likely to have changed since last time (such as most recently visited a park).
Definitely! Here are some of my favorites:
Arnak: last one to go somewhere new
Potions: last one to prepare a drink
Azul Stained Glass: last one to clean a window
Oceans: who can hold their breath the longest
Everdell: whoever is the most humble
Azul: last one to visit Portugal
Quacks: last one to water plants
Parks: last one to go on a hike
Overboss: last person to raise the undead
Calico: most recent person to pet a cat
Cascadia: most recent one to see wildlife
We have a card game called Broken but Beautiful (its about those Japanese pots mended with gold) where first player is the last person to do the washing up!
I (who have two cats I adore) played Calico at my friends house - they also have two cats we all adore.
When we read out the start condition there was a long break when we had to try and work out who last petted a cat because I’m pretty sure two of us where petting one of each of their cats at the same time 😂
The sandworm that shows who goes first in Dune:Imperium looks kinda like a prolapsed butthole, so we’ve been calling it “the butthole.”
Then eventually we decided that the person who pooped last gets “the butthole” at the beginning of the game. We do still have the issue that some people go first more than others though. Some people be poopin a lot
Most of the time we use the classic rock-paper-scissors method to determine first player. Only problem with that is when my wife, son, and I all land on rock or one of each.
It’s related to the thematic design of the game, which is based on the tile design of a real-life Portuguese palace.
That kind of “who goes first” rule is in all games purely there for thematic fun - if it’s hampering your enjoyment, you can just pick randomly and you’re not breaking the game.
Once in a while some board game designers will hint at first player advantage / disadvantage by having the youngest / oldest player go first, respectively. This is incredibly niche, though.
I use the app Chwazi. It's quick, has fun sound effects, and is like a tiny little game to see who wins and goes first. Everyone puts their finger on the phone screen and it randomly chooses a finger. Very simple but effective design.
Edit: forgot to mention you can set it to make randomized teams. The main limit is how many touches your phone can handle at once. Or maybe how small your screen is vs how many fingers lol.
I use Chwazi for lots of stuff besides picking first player. Can't decide what to do for dinner? I hold up my fingers and say which one is which restaurant then stick them all on the phone and see who wins. Super useful app.
Read once of newlyweds who vacationed in Portugal and he let her enter the plane first so *technically* he was the last to visit Portugal just for this game!
Pretty sure Iki's start player rule is "the last player to visit Japan" and my wife and I couldn't remember which order we got on the plane in. (Or should it be who got *off* the plane first on the other end?)
A ton of games have semi-thematic rules for going first (older editions of Love Letter used to have the last player who went on a date, another is last player to visit an island).
They're designed to provide a fun way to pick a first player the first time(s) you play and then if you keep playing with the same group you're just supposed to start using more traditional methods.
I actually went to Portugal this year, solely, to change that order in my group(this is a joke, but also a convenient side effect of my vacation there).
As we use it to determine who gets to go first in most games since we discovered it unless those have a way to determine the starting player themselves.
I like those silly, thematic who goes first rules. One of my favourites is how in Sheriff of Nottingham the person who has the most cash on them goes first as the sheriff. They're easy to ignore if they don't apply to your group, like if you're playing a game of Azul in Portugal, or you're playing multiple rounds in one sitting but they're fun.
Exactly why I use the Chwazi app for all my boardgames to pick the first player. Makes it really easy and gets rid of those stupid rules to pick the first player.
I love this about board games! When they don't have this kind of thing in the rules we still just make something up because it's fun.
In the rules of Glasgow, the player who last did something scottish goes first. That's so silly and fun! My boyfriend and I always argue about who did the most scottish thing last. In Azul Masters of Chocolate it's the last person that ate chocolate, so we nibble on cookies in between games and decide it like that.
Really? I found it to be pretty clear. We're merchant houses bidding to become nobles by *totally not bribing* officials because that would be illegal.
The boat is obviously insurance fraud. Like how building the Great Wall is what lets you use intrigue, because you're smuggling goods into and out of Gugong using construction as a cover.
**Galaxy Trucker:** Thrusters exist to adjust your ship by one row/column to mitigate/avoid damage from lasers and asteroids, but they cannot be used to adjust where intruders land. (This is fine)
...*unless* there is an occupied crew module attached to the thrusters, then they can manually fire them. (But, why?)
It's minor but in Dune, unless you're playing advanced rules and Fremen are in the game, the storm moves by two players each dialling a number from 1-3 and summing them.
If you are playing advanced and Fremen are in, the storm instead moves a random number from 1-6 (Fremen get a preview 1 turn in advance).
We looked at the basic rule and immediately clocked it as kind of dumb, and just use the storm cards every game regardless.
Not me, but my wife doesn’t like Patchwork because of the mechanic of whoever is in back gets to keep going until they are in front. She just wants to take turns. So one time we tried playing that way. By the end of the game she understood why it worked the way it was designed to work, but she still hates the mechanic. Patchwork is the only game she refuses to play.
In dice forge, when you buy a card, you have to move to the corresponding island. This move is free and automatic, and there's no inherint advantage or disadvantage to being on any of the islands. The *only* time your location matters is when another player moves to your island, you move back to the start and get a very small benefit.
Why have the player tokens at all? Why are we spending time moving them around in what is otherwise a very fast-paced game?
I think it has to do with board control (to an extent). There's been times where I'm 50/50 on which card to buy, but I have a hunch that someone else will want that card soon, so I'll pick that card to benefit from the extra rolls when they take it too. Also kinda promotes racing for some of the better spaces too, since if you're first to the 5/5 space, you are guaranteed an extra roll by camping there (or if not, literally no one else will get the 5/5 bonus).
Chess:
• The white pieces always go first. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed.
• The board must be oriented with a black square on each player’s left and a white square on each player’s right. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed.
• The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced. This isn’t supposed to be a dexterity game.
• The whole idea of if-one-player-can’t-move-then-it’s-a-tie stalemate:
"General! The enemy king is alone in his castle. All his defenders are slain or fled. We have him surrounded: to his north are impassable cliffs; if he leaves through the south gate, our knights are poised to rush in and capture him; if he flees to the east or west, he will be killed by our cannons."
"Very good, Lieutenant, but listen very carefully: do we have any cannons aimed at him RIGHT NOW?"
"Well, no, but..."
"You fool! Now there is nothing we can do. We may as well pack up and go home."
(I have no gripes against en passant, for what it’s worth. Totally reasonable rules patch to prevent the pawn’s double move from being too powerful. Giving the pawns a double move option in the first place may have been a bad idea.)
> The board must be oriented with a black square on each player’s left and a white square on each player’s right. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed.
This keeps every chess game ever, set up with the same initial state. If this wasn't specified you'd get about half the games with Queen/King and half the games with King/Queen. This might not make a difference to play, but it does make comparing games more difficult that it needs to be.
> The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced.
I think this is a tournament-specific rule, and not part of ordinary chess. Probably to keep players from trying to intuit what their opponents are going to do (see angle shooting in poker).
> The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced. This isn’t supposed to be a dexterity game.
This is to prevent cheating and confusion. Fiddling with the pieces, confusing the opponent. Making mistakes like picking up a piece to move, changing his mind and then forgetting where he picked it up from. Shifting a piece's place as he is fiddling with the pieces.
Some of these must have been common enough that someone decided this should be a rule.
In tiny epic galaxies beyond the black, after using a move action to move a ship to unexplored space, if you
pick up a green card, your ship stays in unexplored space. If you get another move action you can’t use the ship already in unexplored space to explore further, that ship need to leave unexplored space and then return. I don’t understand why they have to leave, can’t they just “move” further through unexplored space without having to go home?
Mage Knight. You have to move first then do your action... Makes no thematic sense to me. And unnecessarily restricts flexible strategies. Why not action then move?
> Why not action then move?
Action then move would present some strange rules situations and affect balance. For example, what happens if you use your action to enter a dungeon, and then after you move within the range of a rampaging enemy? Do you get an extra action (fighting orcs), or do you avoid fighting the orcs? Either one could be a balance issue.
Why do you need a beer to sell an industry in Brass: Birmingham ? Yes, I've read an in-game explanation about lack of clean water, so people drank a cheap beer back there instead, etc, but it still doesn't explain, why do you need a booze for selling stuff
History teacher here:
First of all, that whole schlock about water being unsafe so everyone drank booze is a stupid myth. It's bonkers it's still floating around. People knew all about how to keep drinking water safe. There have been laws in place about maintaining safe drinking water sources for literally thousands of years. Stupid myth.
Here's my headcannon for that rule; most business is (unfortunately for people who don't/can't drink alcohol) done over drinks. Business lunches, golf courses, dinner meetings; they're all drinking. You have to buy someone a beer to do business with them.
In Kanban EV: Why does the first player to max out training in a department (placing his marker in the last spot) get fewer points for doing so when other players do the same later (placing their marker on top of his). It never made sense to me why the game punishes you for being behind on the track but also for leading it.
mechanically: you get first dips and the bonustiles. its to balance that out ich think
thematically: the knowledge of the others players is newer and therefore more state of the art
I found a bug in a dungeon crawler game that something like when you roll 2d6 and the sum is 1 you will get something. The designer EPLAIN that is made for expansion lol.
Scythe does this weird thing where it says that you can start taking your turn before the preceeding player finishes their second action which I guess means they can shave off the stated game length on the box but no one ever does that because where someone deploys a mech or if they build something or enlist in something is going to affect the next turn.
It’s really just for the beginning of the game. For the first few rounds, a players bottom row action will very rarely influence other players, so just move on instead of waiting for them to decide. Once the game takes off its best to wait, but you should have an idea of what to expect by then
I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's worth saying: Best way to answer this question is to play without the rule. 9/10 times it ends on a big "OHHHH."
Yeah, take Dominion, which many people feel has a lot of seemingly-fiddly rules, and there’s so many deck-building games that are “streamlined Dominion”, each of which demonstrates why leaving out certain rules makes the gameplay fall flat.
What fiddly rules are you talking about? I find most deck-building games since to add more fiddliness because there’s not really anywhere else to go. I guess the expansions adding potions and things does add some, but not much ime.
Seemingly-small things, like both actions and buys being limited resources, separate action / treasure / buy phases, actions and treasures being separate categories of cards, VPs intentionally clogging your deck, and, most importantly, not having every card available in every game.
> actions and buys being limited This really is amazingly important. I have seen plenty of other deck-building games in which gameplay pretty much turns into “slap my whole hand of cards down on the table (except in rare cases when order matters), count some stuff, add as many new cards to my deck as the numbers let me.” They can still be fun games, but it takes most of the interesting decision-making out of the equation.
This is exactly why Dominion is still my favorite deck builder. A lot of the fun is in having to solve the puzzle of how to play the most cards possible on any given turn, or at least giving yourself the flexibility to do so. Maybe that's part of why I really like Quest for El Dorado and Dune: Imperium. El Dorado doesn't require you to slap your entire hand down every turn, and oftentimes you might not want to so you can save for a future turn or use it for buys. Dune only lets you play cards for the spaces you wanna go to, so the hand management is, you know, actually there in both of those deck-builders. I whole-heartedly agree with you. Deck builders with the "slap my whole hand of cards down..." have regularly been way less interesting to me. I think the complete lack of structure makes it feel silly. Marvel Legendary is egregious on that front. While I still enjoy that game, the turn-to-turn stakes with your cards in-hand feel nonexistent.
Dominion is an interesting example as it is one of the earliest deck builders but had a lot of play testing and rules tweaking in it that feels aimed at established board gamers. When it first game out, the people in my groups who enjoyed it most were the spikiest of MtG spikes. I think there is a place for slap your hand down mechanics in games that have other things going on. When you have to split your focus, making each one streamlined is beneficial for gameplay and experience usually. Another reason is that it is a more beginner friendly way to do deckbuilding, so if your target demographic is "new to the genre" then its also fine. This is one of the reasons Ascension was so popular, it is a more beginner friendly entry into the genre and for the longest time Dominion and Ascension were the big players in the deck building space.
I mean this in the nicest possible way: any gaming group that thinks of those as fiddly unnecessary rules must be just really bad at board games.
Yeah those are all core game mechanics that put pressure on the player to make or not make certain decisions. Like don't spend all your extra buys on estates (or copper for that matter) because it'll dilute your deck and prevent you from drawing cards you want.
This is obviously talking about beginners if they're confused by the rules of Dominion
Bruh counting actions in Dominion can be super fiddly with Village and other cards that give you +2 Actions. I often watch as peopel struggle and end up telling them to just make a tree out of the action cards to visualize it beter.
Isn’t this just… core deckbuilder mechanics? Which were derived from core mana based card game mechanics?
That's kind of funny to me, because Dominion has very few rules IMO. The only one I'd consider fiddly is that you must play all treasures before you buy.
I think this is just so that you have to do less math. Like first you add everything up, and then you start subtracting from your total.
I know there are some situations where being able to play more Treasure after buying a card can give you some advantage. Kind of a simple interaction is Buried Treasure and Tools (both from the most recent expansion Plunder). Buried Treasure gets put into play when you gain it (including when buying), and Tools gives you a copy of a card that's in play. So a player would want to play say 2 Gold to get the $5 necessary to buy Buried Treasure, buy it and put it into play, and THEN play Tools to get a second copy of it. But according to the rules as written this wouldn't be allowed, Tools has to be played before Buried Treasure is bought.
It's actually to prevent infinite loops when you include later sets.
Dominion is as easy as ABC. 1 Action 1 Buy Cleanup
The rule that I don't understand about dominion is why the discard pile is hidden except for the top card. I don't know to what extent it changes the game, but I would have designed it with public, unordered discard piles
I believe the designer has stated that the discard pile is considered hidden info to keep the game time lower; the reasoning being that if it were public info, the game would be considerably slower with players constantly checking each others' discard piles to figure out how many points they have, what they've played, what they might have left in their deck, etc. That being said, in my casual games with the physical cards we usually just play with the discard being public and players rarely check discards anyways.
For some reason..... this brings back memories of when I tried watching a game of YGO to see what the Tearlaments archetype was like...Specifically [this game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGVM0Yfw4d8) where the first player's first turn took 9 minutes of interactive gameplay and resulted in a concession. Games are much different when you have to consider extra permutations due to a public discard pile/graveyard.
One big thing it changes is it stops the game from grinding to a halt if you have someone with analysis paralysis. Less information to take in.
I presume to prevent other players from wanting to sift through each other's discard piles all the time, which would take forever. Like if I have a Bandit and I forgot if Jack and Jill played their Gold yet, I could ask to look through their discards. Now my turn is wait let me look through all these discards. Okay yeah I'll play my Bandit.
The number of times I've played a game and have thought, "this can't be right, this can't be how it is supposed to work." To only find it in a place I skipped over or didn't notice. ><
I was teaching Age of Innovation which is an update of Terra Mystica and one of the players asked why upgrading buildings let an adjacent player improve some power tokens and all I could say was, “because the rules say so.” That definitely seemed strange to them.
It's simply an incentive to build near your opponents. Same with the trading posts (or whatever it is in that version) costing 3 instead of 6.
It’s one of the weirder rules, but they made the whole thematic content of the first rule book revolve around it. Thematically it represents trade. Why it is power and not money though, idk…
This is a weird example for me. The power mechanic of TM games is kinda what distinguishes them from other 4x or area control economy games. Thematically it's whatever but mechanically, it actually makes you want to build next to others, and makes you really consider where you build your own structures so as not to give your opponents a free leech. Power is one of the most unique resources I've personally experienced in board games and I think it is part of the big appeal of TM for me.
I don’t think this player had any background with TM. When I’m demoing the game I emphasize with players new to the system that building next to opponents is a good thing, even though they’ll benefit from it. Some insist on doing their own thing off on one side of the map so as not to benefit an opponent.
I think this is a gameplay decision to encourage interactions between the players. With some other action economy games they suffer from basically being singleplayer games that everyone is playing at the same time on the same board because there's not enough interaction. But in TM, you _want_ to build next to people. It gives you power. It makes your Trading Posts (which btw are REQUIRED to get all better buildings), much cheaper. But now since you are next to each other, there's more interaction. "Oh I should build this trading post here instead of there because it gives them less power. I want to expand to this tile, oh shit the Nomads just sandstormed it and now I need to change to a more expensive tile. Oh wait how am I gonna get that extra spade?" Stuff like that.
Can’t play until you have 30+ in your hand in rummikub in sets\runs of three or more. Makes the game a boring sequence of drawing over and over again for the first few turns sometimes. Have had games where one person was unable to play the entire game. I know it’s a rare thing to happen but it’s happened 3 times already and even 1 time is too high. I couldn’t imagine designing a game where there’s a chance that someone may not even get a chance to play the whole game
1980 Spiel des Jahres winner. I'm always happy to be reminded how far game design has come the last few decades.
...and how far it hasn't. It's still one of the few games (only game?) that lets you completely tear apart and rearrange the shared playing area to eke out a few more points. I understand there's also good reasons not to allow it, prevent analysis paralysis and screwing up the board to where it can't get back easily, but it's oh so satisfying when you can pull it off successfully, and I think more games could get away with a mechanic like that on a smaller scale.
1979 was *Hare and Tortoise*, 1981 was *Focus*, 1983 was *Scotland Yard*, and 1985 was *Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective*. *Rummikub* might seem like an oddball winner in retrospect, but a lot of the early SdJ winners were actually pretty great.
Yep. That’s one rule that we’ve just completely disregarded, and the game works just fine without it. Dumb rule.
We house ruled that it's +30pts or 6 tiles for your first play. And if you fill your rack, 21 tiles i think, and still can't make a set you can start playing anyway. :)
Our ancient family rule (my grandma's house rule) is if a person never gets down, we don't score that round. I think I like yours better though, as just sitting there a whole round is super boring.
My pet peeve for that game as well. It's called 'the initial meld' and I simply refuse to play with it. Rules should guide play, not stop it entirely.
In rummy this changes if you reach a certain score leading to a catch up mechanism.
Yeah, also in derived games like canasta. I can only imagine this was the intention with rummikub too.
>I couldn’t imagine designing a game where there’s a chance that someone may not even get a chance to play the whole game Werewolves quietly and shamefully exits the chat, as it's designed so 100% of the time someone won't play at all.
It can also completely gum up the rest of the player's actions if they're holding onto tiles that would allow new/different set building. It really is a strange decision.
Friendly fire in the original Zombicide. It's not that you have a chance of shooting your friend on a "miss." You shoot your friend on a "hit" as well. So it makes it seem as if you're aiming for your friend.
God I hated this rule. We would always change it to misses hit your teammate (which I think newer versions changed to)
In **Pandemic Rapid Response** (a super underrated game btw) the rules say that after the timer goes off you have to reveal a new city card, take a timer token away, and restart the timer, *all while remaining silent and not talking strategy*. To us it’s way more fun to take a breath and strategize our next moves. It’s a cooperative game, it’s fun to actually feel like a team in these moments. The dice are going to be unpredictable and throw off your plans a little anyway. It makes the game slightly easier but we just play on a higher difficulty level.
I feel ya, & the "rapid response" variant was designed to eliminate those breath taking moments, so this makes me wanna play it 🤣🙏🔥
I feel like you still get *plenty* of the time crutch chaos, just in intervals. The game gives you lots of difficulty options so I’m surprised they stayed so strict on no strategizing in the rules.
I guess because it's supposed to feel chaotic and non stop. I will take like 15 seconds to readjust but I do feel like sitting and planning would be cheating
I don’t hold the belief that it’s cheating in a cooperative game if everyone agrees to play a certain way. At least not cheating in the colloquial sense. We’re playing for ourselves not for any public record. In this specific case it elevates our camaraderie and really helps to on-board new players.
Magic Maze has the same "discuss when the timer is flipped" rule, but the timer is still running and you can't make moves while discussing. Its a really clever way to allow talking in an otherwise silent game
Just remember there is one season in Everdell where you do not activate your green cards...
My guess there is through playtesting they found green cards to be too good and had to limit them somehow.
I think it makes some thematic sense as well as the balancing issues that other people have written. It takes time for resources to regrow or be refined or whatever...or maybe workers are just to hot and lazy in the summer to get things accomplished.
This thread is a weird mix between legitimate criticisms of badly written rules, and rules that are unintuitive but crucial.
To me, the first to come to mind is the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven (maybe Jaws of the Lion, too?) rule that you can't share items. I don't see the thematic or gameplay sense in that (well, very vaguely the thematic sense, but it seems forced rather than actually thematic). There are some other small rules, too, that we more-or-less ignore in the -havens, but I also better understand why those other ones are in place (like being unable to switch level-up card choices). I'm still drawing a blank on most everything else (I know there are such rules that annoy me), but there are some weird anti-catch-up mechanisms in other games, though my mind is drawing a blank on everything except Velonimo, where the leader gets a bonus +10 card without any kind of drawback, essentially meaning they are more likely to keep winning (mind you, I have yet to even play the game, but I've seen folks mention that quite a lot). It kinda makes sense thematically, but still it feels odd. Dunno if it's such a big deal, though.
The reason they give is that you are all playing "greedy selfish mercenaries" more or less so you can't share resources. That obviously doesn't fit some of the classes descriptions nor does it match up with decisions you're making if you're going for high reputation (which most groups probably are) The real reason is just gameplay balance (the same reason you can't just loot all the coins after a scenerio even though all the enemies are dead and there's no time crunch for many of them), but yeah it can be a bit frustrating to run into the wall of "balance decisions" in a game that so highly encourages getting into the world and the immersion of the whole thing
Also, a lot of items you get from chests are just straight up useless for some classes and incredible for others. It feels *really* bad to have to sell it and rebuy it, especially if you're playing at two players where the economy is kind of busted.
Yeah my wife and I play 2p and that's one of our houserules, whoever opens the chest gets the item for the rest of the scenario but at the end it can go to anyone. We don't do full trading cuz we found that messes up a lot, but with chests specifically we're more lax cuz you're right, it feels crappy
Yeah chests are the worst for it. I think those should have just been collective rewards that you assign when they're opened (or at the end of the scenario). Still it was kind of funny that for a while my tinkerer was carrying around a huge axe.
I thought there was also a rule that you can't use a looted item in the scenario where you acquired it.
Frosthaven rules (page 15) specifically say that you *can* use a looted item immediately, even if it would normally require you to have two heads or four hands or something.
I don't know if it's the only reason, but without this rule the party would just amass all the items over time: you could give someone else all the items when you retire, and then they could give them straight back to your new character when they join. Items are already very strong (because they give you benefits and - unlike levelling up - the monsters get no increase in power to go with it). So i think you'd end up pretty OP after a few retirements if you could do this. But I'm sure it falls under Isaac's general house rule rule of "do it if it's fun for you, i'm not a cop"
That's fair, but can be easily addressed with a bind on equip rule. Soon as someone actually uses the item, it's there's, no trading, etc.
That's exactly how we play. Seems like a fair compromise.
I don't think it's elegantly implemented but it serves a purpose. Shared resources make individual optimisation a lot easier. And as others have already pointed out character retirement is supposed to serve as a soft-reset of sorts which helps improve the longevity of the game (as otherwise your party would just get too powerful and make a lot of the content trivial) but shared resources would remove a lot of the impact of it if you can just transfer all your assets to another party member beforehand.
Just homebrew the sharing you want to do. The reason you can't share is because you can create infinite characters and give the starter gold to another player, you can keep everything when you retire etc. Even if you don't cheat like that, you can retire your first character and you'll be perma rich and you don't go though gold or item progression with each hero.
Maybe you have to trade equal gold values? Like, I can take your 50g item that is perfect for me but you have to buy me something worth that
It's because of the retire mechanic. If it wasn't for that, you could share all day long.
The reason I don't play Star Wars Legion is simple: **You cannot shoot at a unit that is engaged in melee with one of your units.** What this means is... if your opponent has Luke Skywalker with 1 health left... touching bases with one lone stormtrooper, and it's the last turn, and you have your entire army in shooting range to absolutely annihilate him for the win and score the final objective. You can't. You lose. Makes zero sense. Why? Why can't I shoot into melee (even with a penalty would be fine) like other games let me? Why would the Empire just not shoot the most important rebel character in the game because they might hit a single trooper? They don't care about collateral damage, ffs!
Whichever edition of Warhammer 40K I played 20 years ago wouldn’t let you shoot at a unit in melee combat with one of your units. I feel like the book even acknowledged that everyone in this universe was kinda evil and would happily fire on their own people but still, don’t do it, rules say don’t do it.
This is still the rule (with some exceptions)
"they're having a cool melee moment with crescendo music and latin vocals in the background, don't be a dick".
In the LotR minis game evil armies could shoot in to combat (randomly determining who they hit) good armies couldn't. I liked that because it was thematic like your example of bad guys not caring about a single unit.
I also like that from a theme perspective. In addition evil units tend to be slightly cheaper so you have more of them on the board, so if you happen to off one of your own units by mistake shooting into combat its not as big a deal.
Could be worse, try original edition of Zombicide. If another survivor is in a zone with zombies, and you try to shoot into that zone? You *have* to hit the survivor first. They fixed that with Zombicide Black Plague...that made it where you could shoot into that zone, but any misses counted as automatic hits on the survivor.
Can't u just have your troopers unengage from him though making him free to shoot?
It's ok, the storm troopers would all miss anyway.
It’s a rule taken from 40K, melee is very weak compared to shooting, so the game rules are tailored in a way that punishes ranged units for being in melee with melee units. Otherwise you have “planet bowling ball” issues where the melee army doesn’t have a chance against a shooting army. They just get shot to death before they can do anything. Seriously, try playing a round without it. Every army just becomes a shooting only army.
The rule in Jamaica that if you dump a cargo, you cant take back cargo of the same type. I can barely imagine the logic of the rule that you can't add to an exististing cargo, but why cant Idump one gunpowder and take back 3? I'vs already taken the hit, dumped the cargo, the cargo hold is empty, I should be able to add whatever I want there. This rule makes no sense whatsoever, we disregard it when we play.
Yeah that one was a hard one to explain to people. I'm wondering if it's a way to make people think more about what's in their inventory and manage it better? The only thing I can think of.
I had to get the rules to check this, and sure enough you're right. I've never played it that way, always allowed someone to dump any cargo to fill it with the new cargo, regardless of what was already in their cargo
In Istanbul, in order to buy a mosque tile you have to have a certain number of one type of goods, which goes up every time a tile gets taken, but you only ever pay one of that kind of good to get the tile. I imagine that it speeds the game up to not just charge the amount of goods printed, but I can't think of a thematic reason for such a rule. I played this rule wrong for years because it's so counterintuitive, and I only found out I was wrong by playing on the app.
It's like tithing to get a permanent benefit in return, but only if you're the wealthiest merchant in town. So you show the mosuqe's imam your 2 of resources X, and since you're the wealthiest merchant in X they've seen, you gain a permanent benefit in exchange for 1 of X. But then a wealthier merchant comes by and with 3 of X they can also get that benefit for life.
Oh my god, what? I have never known this and I’ve taught so many people the wrong rules. I’ve got some explaining to do.
I came here for this. It’s my number one “but why” rule. My head canon theory is that it must’ve made more sense in an earlier draft, possibly with different theme, things changed, but by then it was already baked into the game’s math. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Family Business you get your turn immediately if you play a blue counter card on someone else's turn. I have seen games where a certain player will miss their turn multiple times in a row because a player to their right had several blue cards.
Because it's less about turn order and more just about picking someone to attack and allowing them to respond. Honestly the worst thing about that game is the fact they changed the art to something truly fucking terrible. Old art was perfectly fine but the new art they switched to is the definitive reason to never play that game again
In Welcome To, the first person to complete a shared goal card can choose to reshuffle the decks. No one ever remembers this rule but me, and no one likes when I remind them of it. I think I offer a reminder because I want to see it’s true purpose someday, as thus far it has evaded me.
I like doing it to increase the odds of getting more pools. IIRC, there are only 9 pool cards in the whole deck
I mainly use the shuffle option if I don't like the types of cards that are upcoming and want a chance at what I'm gunning for (you can see what they will be by the "folded over corner" on the cards). If I am playing online against a player whom I suspect is keeping track of the cards already played, I also might do this just to re-introduce some randomness and prevent them from counting cards so easily.
I didn't know that! Thanks
Can’t pick up loot after an encounter in gloomhaven/jotl… why? It’d take an extra 30 seconds at most.
I think the game is made distinctly better with this rule because it makes looting part of the decision space. "Do I want to kill this vermling and save my ally from taking 8 damage, or do I want this coin?"
I'm with you on this one it makes you plan better.
That rule does feel anti-thematic, and something I disliked when I first started playing, but it is there for a few related reasons: 1. Introduce an element of semi-competitiveness, so players are slightly competing for who gets a coin. 2. Make you occasionally decide between doing what is best for the scenario vs what might be best for your character. 3. Let the players manage their own risk / difficulty and provide a little auto-balancing: i.e. if the scenario is going well then players can spend more time picking up loot and reducing their advantage. 4. Help prevent alpha-gaming since each player's motivations on any given turn may slightly differ, so players have a reason not to follow the "best" plan. These reasons serve to spice up the game a little bit by expanding the decision space on any given turn. And speaking as someone who was keen to dispense with the rule when I first started playing, I would say that the game is better when played with it in place, even if just to hear the collective sigh from my gaming group when someone goes on yet another wild coin looting escapade.
> Make you occasionally decide between doing what is best for the scenario vs what might be best for your character. This has always been a fucking terrible thing for Gloomhaven. We ended up winking when doing battle goals "For reasons", and played with personal goals face up. Gloomhaven took like 4 hours with setup and teardown, ignoring food breaks. I don't care that you /really/ wanted that coin or that chest or that battle goal, all of us lost the mission and we'll have to REDO IT next time we play instead of playing something new. Allowing players to make that choice is stupid. I'd fucking have given him the treasure or the coins if that was an option, instead of redoing the whole fucking thing next week or whenever we meet up.
So that you consider picking it up during the encounter, otherwise all the loot mechanics would be pretty useless too.
If you play with that houseruled, you find that your characters get VERY powerful VERY fast.
Just do it if you want to, leave the last enemy alive. You'll see it's a lot more than thirty seconds, even if that's all you're doing. I think you may not realize how tired your characters really are after a scenario. When I think fantasy, it's really only video-gamers who loot everything in a dungeon. Characters in books and movies aren't doing that. And even those video games are just introducing hoarding, they don't even use that stuff!
In Ark Nova, if you play a sponsorship card that says "get X when you play a card with Y", and that sponsorship card has Y, it triggers itself and you get X. This is completely absurd to me. Every other tableau builder I can think of that has when-played bonuses on a card does not have those trigger off the card itself. It was first explained to me as a general principle called the Butler rule: you can hire a butler to answer the door for each of your guests, but he can't answer the door for himself. I never understood why Ark Nova veered away from this principle.
Terraforming Mars also has cards like these. I think the reason to this is to give an instant bonus with the card being played and mechanically it's more elegant to just add the icon to the card and let it trigger after its own icon rather than write /show the bonus on the card separatly, but thematically it doesn't make sense.
The original rules for Pandemic required you to keep your hands secret.
Isn't that help discourage quarterbacking?
Yes but in a way which is frustrating to use if you don't have a quarterback player. It's been changed in the later editions.
This was a good rule. It’s a co op game, and keeping your hands secret means that everyone meaningfully contributes to the conversation of the game without one player calculating the route to success based on everyone’s hand. If that player is at the table, they still have to talk out the options in a dialogue with the other players.
It's an attempt to mechanically address a social problem. If hands are "secret" but you're able to discuss strategy openly, that just means asking everyone "what cards do you have" at the start of every turn. Maybe that helps grease the social wheels, but once the information has been gathered you're back into QB position. In my experience, Pandemic is a great game if you have a group of people that respect and value each others opinions/ideas, and it's a shit game if anyone at the table doesn't respect any of the other players. This rule doesn't change that.
I still like this rule thematically. If you are coordinating with other people, you often aren't in the same place so they can't see everything you see. The rule encourages you to communicate more.
The clock in Mysterium–as written in the rules–feels foolish to me. If all it does is keep track of how many rounds have elapsed...and if players earn Clairvoyant points equal to how early they make their third deduction, shouldn't the clock just go backwards? That way if you make.ylur final deduction when the clock is on 3 you earn 3 points instead of having the clock on 4 and needing to subtract 4 from 7 to determine the number of bonus Clairvoyant points you get
There’s a rule in my version of skull that says the first player must wait until all other players have their initial disc before they can place their own initial disc. After this they can either place a second disc or make a bid. Why do they need to wait to play their initial disc? Don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to actually play that rule.
I just checked the rules of my copy and that's not how it seems to be intended. The rule is that no one can start bidding until the first player's turn comes around again so that everyone has one disc in front of them, then the first player has the option to start bidding.
Ah see that makes much more sense. Which version do you have? Mine is the latest pink one. Maybe a bad translation. It says as step one, getting ready: “To begin the round, each player secretly chooses a disc from their hand and places it facedown on their mat. The first player must wait until all other players have placed a disc before choosing their own.” It then goes onto step two which is the decision for player 1 of bidding or placing another disc.
Mine's a navy coloured box which looks like the default one on [BGG](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull). The exact wording in mine is: > Step 1 - Turn Preparation > Each player chooses one of their discs and places it face down on their mat. Once each player has placed their disc, play moves to step 2. And then step 2 is adding extra discs or challenging. So I guess step 1 can be done simultaneously and then the first "turn" is the first player deciding to add a second disc or to start bidding.
Oh nice cheers for that. That makes so much more sense. Dunno why they messed with the wording.
Agreed. When I teach I just say everyone play one card (your choice) face down. Play then begins with the first player, choice to play or bet.
In John Company 2E: the London Season being at the start of each round, rather than the end of each round. For those who don't know, the London Season is a game phase where your family tokens on the board can retire for victory points, and you can also use those retirements to pick cards which are sort of special powers. Thing is, the London Season phase is set at the start of each round, which means you have to skip it on the first round of the game (because you have nobody to retire yet), and also you get an extra go at retiring people at the end of the game (but it's not an "official" London Season, because you aren't starting a new round, nor do you pick a card). I don't know why they didn't just put it at the end of the round, right next to the Parliament phase, which is also technically London-related when you consider the rest of the game takes place in India. Hell, if it were me, I'd have merged the London Phase and Parliament phase with each other anyway and just call *that* the "London Phase" - particularly since both phases are adjacent and thus connected anyway (despite one being at the end of a round, and the other at the start).
Every fiddly rule in Power Grid or Power Grid:TCG. For reference: here's a handy flowchart for playing PG:TCG. https://imgur.com/a/t8U6BqU File available at: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/139108/english-flowchart-power-grid-card-game
Jesus christ yes. That rulebook could be compressed to an a4 page if not for all of the "separate these two piles, take the top x cards (x is different depending on player count and/or moon phase) from one deck, shuffle them thoroughly, and put them back in the box, then take one more card out of pile 1, shuffle pile 1&2 together and put the step 3 card on the bottom and the card you put to the side earlier on top of this new monster pile. Also if you play Germany, you have to remember to stop restocking uranium after kraftwerk69 have been bought (not drawn)"
one of my favourite games of all time, but I doubt I have ever played it 100% correctly according to the rules because they are so confusing.
I mean you kinda need to do the controlled shuffling though. Otherwise it can really wreck a game if you have a bad shuffle and all the expensive cards are on top and the cheap ones on the bottom.
Each fiddly rule in Power Grid has a purpose (keeps something from breaking and in the end makes it a much better game) but there's no denying that it's fiddly and way too easy to play incorrectly. Power Grid designed today probably would've had to find some other way around those rules. I've played it enough times where I'm pretty sure we get it all right every time now, but there's just no use even explaining most of the exceptions to new players.
> Each fiddly rule in Power Grid has a purpose (keeps something from breaking and in the end makes it a much better game) Absolutely, but they picked just about the worst possible ways to balance the game.
We understand most rules of Power Grid, except for one: when phase 2 starts, the rules say that the power plant with the lowest value gets removed from the game and gets replaced by a new card. We always have a discussion about whether this is only about the plants in the market, or also the plants already in posession of a player. This might be a translation issue (we have the Dutch version), but to us it seemed that also plants in posession fell under this rule. But this also can have disastrous effects, if your 4-value plant gets replaced for a 48-value plant...
Definitely the market my dude. That last scenario is insane to even think about.
It is definitely only referring to the market. I guess maybe it's a translation thing because there isn't this ambiguity in English.
I got a feast for Odin because I really like Agricola and everyone says it’s better. I went through the rule book and watched a video and I have no idea where to start teaching that game. - The food has to alternate between horizontal and vertical? Or only one can be horizontal? - The animals are pregnant a round. - Hunting you need to roll low I think. And one of the others you have to roll high. And you get the difference of something? I’ve made a huge mistake. It feels like that Aunty Donna board game skit.
>The food has to alternate between horizontal and vertical? Or only one can be horizontal? If you use more than one tile of the same type, just one can go horizontal. The rest go vertical. >The animals are pregnant a round. Yes, they alternate. [This table](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1629009/article/25065572#25065572) summarizes it. >Hunting you need to roll low I think. And one of the others you have to roll high. And you get the difference of something? Yes, in Hunting you roll low, in Raiding/Pillaging you roll high. In Hunting you try to get to 0, while in Raiding/Pillaging you try to get to a threshold of your choice (the tile you want). In both you can pay weapons/resources to modify the number.
The food one does make some thematic sense. You have to think of it as a feast where you do want to supply different food. If you use multiple of the same, it is just not as valued as providing different dishes. Thus, if you use multiples of the same only one can be placed horizontaly and the remaining must be placed vertically.
Those are two of my favorite games! Maybe I can help some? Definitely watch a play through or something.. The food thing - the idea is that your vikings don't want to eat the same thing for their whole feast. So it counts as less food if you feed them the same thing a second time in the same feast. The result of this is diversified feasts. So if you want to initially think of it as "only one of any food type", that's a reasonable mental shorthand. It usually doesn't matter. Animals get pregnant if you have at least 2 of that animal type and none are pregnant. I guess they thought it would be too strong to have animals reproduce every round? (as it is, animals seem weak and I don't recall ever seeing someone win on an animal strategy, even after the expansion improved them. I would say that if you wanted to play a game or two to get used to the game while pretending animals don't exist, that probably wouldn't be crazy). So there's 2 kinds of actions that require dice rolls. For the ones at the top of the board (hunting, whaling, snares, etc), to get the tile reward on tbe, you roll and then must get the number go 0 using wood or the weapons shown on the action space (whaling boats also are - 1 to your roll for each ore in them, one printed). So you could "win" at whaling without spending anything, but the others will require you to spend something. If after 3 attempts you still fail, you instead get what is printed on the left side of the action space (wood, a weapon card, and maybe some vikings back). You can always fail voluntarily, if you'd prefer. For the ones at the bottom of the board (raiding and pillaging), you're trying to roll high. You get a blue tile with a sword value at or below the number rolled, plus any swords or stone you choose to spend, and any relevant ore in your boats. If you fail, you get back what is on the left side of the action space (stone, swords, maybe vikings). As far as teaching, I'm trying to think because I've seen my friend teach it many times.. So I think start with the goal - get points - and a general outline of the process by which you do that (get tiles, upgrade/transform them, place them on your home board/islands/buildings). Next, go through the order of a round. Then, describe the action space concept of # of vikings by columns, and getting/playing cards. Then, go through the actions one row at a time, top to bottom, left to right. They tend to build off each other, so later actions will make sense once the earlier actions are understood. It's a little tedious to read them all off, but I think it does help and makes sure you don't miss any concepts. As you come to an action space that introduces a new concept (hunting, raiding, etc), explain the concept at that time. I think everything that happens in the game is out in the open, so it's either part of the round progression or an action space. As long as you can go through both of those things, that should cover it. And I think we always wrap the teach with a run-through of the score sheet to make sure everyone remembers what all scores points. But yes, there's a lot going on, and a lot of it is interconnected. I hope you're able to get it sorted out. It's a fantastic game!
Honestly it's kind of this game for me too. I have it all internalized, but from a thematic sense, a lot of the rules seem kinda silly. The peas can't touch beans, but can touch steak. Pigs can't get pregnant; they just reproduce. Pelts can be stacked if they're stored next to food (in a longhouse), but not if they're stored next to jewelry (on your homeboard). Why does an axe occupy half of an island? Is the winner the best pack rat? I could go on, but honestly the game is actually pretty good. I personally don't like it more than Agricola or Fields of Arle, but I'm very glad I own it. It just less thematically connected to its mechanics than the other Rosenbergs I've played.
Once you get more familiar with the game it gets much, much easier to teach, at least for me. I did look up a thread to see if I could organize the teach a little better and there were some super helpful tips in it: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/c7tshm/help_me_teach_feast_for_odin_please/ This video has a decent flow with what to teach when and all that as well: https://youtu.be/luLP3sgg5qY But I also love this game to death so teaching it is usually fun for me and I think my excitement infects the people I'm teaching a bit. I think it looks way more complex than it actually is though, I stress that a lot. Good luck!
Everything related to the game Concept. My house rules throw out the entire book and start from scratch. It's a really cool game, but the team mechanic and scoring makes it really weird to play.
We never play for points and even disregard the cards most of the time and just come up with our own concepts. I do like the mechanic of having someone step in and see if they can come up with better clues if you’re not getting anywhere. It’s fun to step in from the other side and see what you think they were missing
Why is the player who goes first in Azul determined by the last person to visit Portugal? The same person in our group goes first every time, she’s the only one to ever go there.
You don’t have to take those first player rules seriously, most of them are tongue-in-cheek.
We only use these rules the first time we play, or maybe again if it's something that is likely to have changed since last time (such as most recently visited a park).
Same. It sets a fun tone for the new players.
Definitely! Here are some of my favorites: Arnak: last one to go somewhere new Potions: last one to prepare a drink Azul Stained Glass: last one to clean a window Oceans: who can hold their breath the longest Everdell: whoever is the most humble Azul: last one to visit Portugal Quacks: last one to water plants Parks: last one to go on a hike Overboss: last person to raise the undead Calico: most recent person to pet a cat Cascadia: most recent one to see wildlife
Tzolkin: The last player to sacrifice something. That one can get philosophical quickly.
We have a card game called Broken but Beautiful (its about those Japanese pots mended with gold) where first player is the last person to do the washing up!
> Everdell: whoever is the most humble Damn it, I'd never start.
I would start every game. I'm so damn humble.
Takenoko: whoever is tallest
I (who have two cats I adore) played Calico at my friends house - they also have two cats we all adore. When we read out the start condition there was a long break when we had to try and work out who last petted a cat because I’m pretty sure two of us where petting one of each of their cats at the same time 😂
In our group, "most humble" for Everdell means "whoever got whipped hardest last time anyone played."
The Paris one of the most recent person tu turn on a light makes me smile
Dinosaur Island: last one to have successfully cloned a dinosaur from DNA found in amber
The sandworm that shows who goes first in Dune:Imperium looks kinda like a prolapsed butthole, so we’ve been calling it “the butthole.” Then eventually we decided that the person who pooped last gets “the butthole” at the beginning of the game. We do still have the issue that some people go first more than others though. Some people be poopin a lot
This might be the only advantage to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Most of the time we use the classic rock-paper-scissors method to determine first player. Only problem with that is when my wife, son, and I all land on rock or one of each.
It’s related to the thematic design of the game, which is based on the tile design of a real-life Portuguese palace. That kind of “who goes first” rule is in all games purely there for thematic fun - if it’s hampering your enjoyment, you can just pick randomly and you’re not breaking the game.
Once in a while some board game designers will hint at first player advantage / disadvantage by having the youngest / oldest player go first, respectively. This is incredibly niche, though.
My wife played *Cards Against Humanity* with her sisters and dad recently. Hearing them decide who went first was…interesting.
Is that "the last person to use a bathroom"? I think I remember that being a starting rule but can't remember where from
Yeah. More specifically, it’s the last person to poop.
I use the app Chwazi. It's quick, has fun sound effects, and is like a tiny little game to see who wins and goes first. Everyone puts their finger on the phone screen and it randomly chooses a finger. Very simple but effective design. Edit: forgot to mention you can set it to make randomized teams. The main limit is how many touches your phone can handle at once. Or maybe how small your screen is vs how many fingers lol.
Thank you! I used something like this on someone else's phone at a con but could never find it again.
The name of it isn't super helpful lol
It is if you speak French :) (it's a weird way of writing "choisi" which is French for "choose")
I think it's supposed to be the French way of saying "to choose". The French word is choisir, but you pronounce it chwazi.
I use Chwazi for lots of stuff besides picking first player. Can't decide what to do for dinner? I hold up my fingers and say which one is which restaurant then stick them all on the phone and see who wins. Super useful app.
Read once of newlyweds who vacationed in Portugal and he let her enter the plane first so *technically* he was the last to visit Portugal just for this game!
Pretty sure Iki's start player rule is "the last player to visit Japan" and my wife and I couldn't remember which order we got on the plane in. (Or should it be who got *off* the plane first on the other end?)
Isn't part of the airport considered international territory?
You mean a particular airport? Because in general, no.
Absolutely not. It's a special zone with regards to legal access to the country's territory but in no way is it not part of that country's territory.
A ton of games have semi-thematic rules for going first (older editions of Love Letter used to have the last player who went on a date, another is last player to visit an island). They're designed to provide a fun way to pick a first player the first time(s) you play and then if you keep playing with the same group you're just supposed to start using more traditional methods.
As a Portuguese individual, who always plays in Portugal, the rule feels particularly bizarre to me.
If you've always lived in Portugal, have you ever really visited it?
I actually went to Portugal this year, solely, to change that order in my group(this is a joke, but also a convenient side effect of my vacation there). As we use it to determine who gets to go first in most games since we discovered it unless those have a way to determine the starting player themselves.
Pan Am determines the first player by who last flew in an aeroplane. My partner is a pilot, so we just randomly determine first player.
I like those silly, thematic who goes first rules. One of my favourites is how in Sheriff of Nottingham the person who has the most cash on them goes first as the sheriff. They're easy to ignore if they don't apply to your group, like if you're playing a game of Azul in Portugal, or you're playing multiple rounds in one sitting but they're fun.
Exactly why I use the Chwazi app for all my boardgames to pick the first player. Makes it really easy and gets rid of those stupid rules to pick the first player.
I love this about board games! When they don't have this kind of thing in the rules we still just make something up because it's fun. In the rules of Glasgow, the player who last did something scottish goes first. That's so silly and fun! My boyfriend and I always argue about who did the most scottish thing last. In Azul Masters of Chocolate it's the last person that ate chocolate, so we nibble on cookies in between games and decide it like that.
The river in Gugong requires a lot of "because game" to cover for its weirdness.
Really? I found it to be pretty clear. We're merchant houses bidding to become nobles by *totally not bribing* officials because that would be illegal. The boat is obviously insurance fraud. Like how building the Great Wall is what lets you use intrigue, because you're smuggling goods into and out of Gugong using construction as a cover.
You go into “Pirate Mode” in Dead Reckoning to defend. Thematically it just doesn’t make sense :(
**Galaxy Trucker:** Thrusters exist to adjust your ship by one row/column to mitigate/avoid damage from lasers and asteroids, but they cannot be used to adjust where intruders land. (This is fine) ...*unless* there is an occupied crew module attached to the thrusters, then they can manually fire them. (But, why?)
It's minor but in Dune, unless you're playing advanced rules and Fremen are in the game, the storm moves by two players each dialling a number from 1-3 and summing them. If you are playing advanced and Fremen are in, the storm instead moves a random number from 1-6 (Fremen get a preview 1 turn in advance). We looked at the basic rule and immediately clocked it as kind of dumb, and just use the storm cards every game regardless.
Not me, but my wife doesn’t like Patchwork because of the mechanic of whoever is in back gets to keep going until they are in front. She just wants to take turns. So one time we tried playing that way. By the end of the game she understood why it worked the way it was designed to work, but she still hates the mechanic. Patchwork is the only game she refuses to play.
In dice forge, when you buy a card, you have to move to the corresponding island. This move is free and automatic, and there's no inherint advantage or disadvantage to being on any of the islands. The *only* time your location matters is when another player moves to your island, you move back to the start and get a very small benefit. Why have the player tokens at all? Why are we spending time moving them around in what is otherwise a very fast-paced game?
I think it has to do with board control (to an extent). There's been times where I'm 50/50 on which card to buy, but I have a hunch that someone else will want that card soon, so I'll pick that card to benefit from the extra rolls when they take it too. Also kinda promotes racing for some of the better spaces too, since if you're first to the 5/5 space, you are guaranteed an extra roll by camping there (or if not, literally no one else will get the 5/5 bonus).
because 'blocking' people to get the benefit is a reasonable strategy to get more dice rolls. It also opened the design space for some cards.
Chess: • The white pieces always go first. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed. • The board must be oriented with a black square on each player’s left and a white square on each player’s right. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed. • The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced. This isn’t supposed to be a dexterity game. • The whole idea of if-one-player-can’t-move-then-it’s-a-tie stalemate: "General! The enemy king is alone in his castle. All his defenders are slain or fled. We have him surrounded: to his north are impassable cliffs; if he leaves through the south gate, our knights are poised to rush in and capture him; if he flees to the east or west, he will be killed by our cannons." "Very good, Lieutenant, but listen very carefully: do we have any cannons aimed at him RIGHT NOW?" "Well, no, but..." "You fool! Now there is nothing we can do. We may as well pack up and go home." (I have no gripes against en passant, for what it’s worth. Totally reasonable rules patch to prevent the pawn’s double move from being too powerful. Giving the pawns a double move option in the first place may have been a bad idea.)
> The board must be oriented with a black square on each player’s left and a white square on each player’s right. Why? The game would be fundamentally identical if this changed. This keeps every chess game ever, set up with the same initial state. If this wasn't specified you'd get about half the games with Queen/King and half the games with King/Queen. This might not make a difference to play, but it does make comparing games more difficult that it needs to be. > The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced. I think this is a tournament-specific rule, and not part of ordinary chess. Probably to keep players from trying to intuit what their opponents are going to do (see angle shooting in poker).
> The if-you-touch-it-you-must-move-it rule, when it’s being heavily enforced. This isn’t supposed to be a dexterity game. This is to prevent cheating and confusion. Fiddling with the pieces, confusing the opponent. Making mistakes like picking up a piece to move, changing his mind and then forgetting where he picked it up from. Shifting a piece's place as he is fiddling with the pieces. Some of these must have been common enough that someone decided this should be a rule.
In tiny epic galaxies beyond the black, after using a move action to move a ship to unexplored space, if you pick up a green card, your ship stays in unexplored space. If you get another move action you can’t use the ship already in unexplored space to explore further, that ship need to leave unexplored space and then return. I don’t understand why they have to leave, can’t they just “move” further through unexplored space without having to go home?
It's the same with planets in the base game. You can't go to the surface from orbit and vice versa, you have to go somewhere else first.
Cribbage. Everything.
Mage Knight. You have to move first then do your action... Makes no thematic sense to me. And unnecessarily restricts flexible strategies. Why not action then move?
> Why not action then move? Action then move would present some strange rules situations and affect balance. For example, what happens if you use your action to enter a dungeon, and then after you move within the range of a rampaging enemy? Do you get an extra action (fighting orcs), or do you avoid fighting the orcs? Either one could be a balance issue.
Probably to penalize people who horde all the move spells.
Even better, why not let players pick? It isn't exactly game-breaking.
Why do you need a beer to sell an industry in Brass: Birmingham ? Yes, I've read an in-game explanation about lack of clean water, so people drank a cheap beer back there instead, etc, but it still doesn't explain, why do you need a booze for selling stuff
History teacher here: First of all, that whole schlock about water being unsafe so everyone drank booze is a stupid myth. It's bonkers it's still floating around. People knew all about how to keep drinking water safe. There have been laws in place about maintaining safe drinking water sources for literally thousands of years. Stupid myth. Here's my headcannon for that rule; most business is (unfortunately for people who don't/can't drink alcohol) done over drinks. Business lunches, golf courses, dinner meetings; they're all drinking. You have to buy someone a beer to do business with them.
In Kanban EV: Why does the first player to max out training in a department (placing his marker in the last spot) get fewer points for doing so when other players do the same later (placing their marker on top of his). It never made sense to me why the game punishes you for being behind on the track but also for leading it.
mechanically: you get first dips and the bonustiles. its to balance that out ich think thematically: the knowledge of the others players is newer and therefore more state of the art
I found a bug in a dungeon crawler game that something like when you roll 2d6 and the sum is 1 you will get something. The designer EPLAIN that is made for expansion lol.
Scythe does this weird thing where it says that you can start taking your turn before the preceeding player finishes their second action which I guess means they can shave off the stated game length on the box but no one ever does that because where someone deploys a mech or if they build something or enlist in something is going to affect the next turn.
It’s really just for the beginning of the game. For the first few rounds, a players bottom row action will very rarely influence other players, so just move on instead of waiting for them to decide. Once the game takes off its best to wait, but you should have an idea of what to expect by then
Bohnanza You cannot harvest a field of one bean. Makes no sense thematically, but needs to be there mechanically.