If you want the flexibility of changing the rules, you should be flexible enough to change them back

[laurion]

I'm a big board game geek, that's no surprise to most. This means that I often come across cases of 'variations' or 'house rules'. By and by, I support the idea. Many pople do. think about when you play Monopoly. What house rules do you use? That said, most games have undergone a lot of playtesting, and the rules are well worked out; so don't change the rules so much that you are playing a different game. Actually, one should always be careful when using variants or house rules that everyone playing agrees to them, or else it borders on unfaur and unethical play (not quite as bad as cheating). If going overboard helps illustrate the point, see http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40779&rss=1 .

Oh, and if you're curious about Ethics and Gaming, go read the articles on it over at http://www.thegamesjournal.com/

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Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

House rule, Monopoly: The money pot in the middle of the board.
House rule, Scrabble: Any real word in any real language is OK. Latin is real, Klingon is not.

[laurion]

Monopoly: That and the 400/Go seem to be the two most popular house rules, so much so that many electronic versions of the game inclde those options. I've seen some pretty odd ones though, including things like houses on railroads, and building up to double hotel.

Scrabble: Uh-oh, you must have to have a lot of dictionaries lying around when things get fierce....
Does that make Q so useable that the point scale is off?

[wombatbanana.livejournal.com]

What if at the end of the game, you rescaled the tiles taking into account the letter frequencies in every language in play on the board, weighted according to how many of the words on the board came from that language? That'd be crazy.