Have you ever played a game wrong* but only found out after you played it several times? Then you thought, Oh man, but I liked it the wrong way!
This phenomenon reared its head when I recently taught and played Dizzle -- the correct way -- and hated it. (I only noticed we’d been playing it non-normally when I saw responses to an unrelated forum thread on BGG. The ways people referred to Dizzle’s rules didn’t make sense, because I thought the rules said something else. Sure enough, I’d had it all wrong. And I’ve discovered quite a lot of wrong notions in this accidental, slantways method on BGG. Has anyone else?)
Thinking of other games, I noticed a theme. Jamie and I have played several games improperly and loved them. For those, we won’t ever go back to the “right” way to play. And we figured we should share our discoveries with the world.
Ergo, a new series soon to follow this post. “Rules We Got Wrong (That Made the Game Better).” We’ll add a few entries now, then we can tag later entries into this same series. They’ll all be mini-variants, although they drastically change the game experience.
By the way, not every time we get something wrong results in a better game. Here are some examples of board games whose rules we flubbed, and we would not recommend that you do the same:
Azul (a round consists of just 1 Factory offer phase per player, before moving to Wall-tiling and the end of the round -- WRONG!)
Azul: Queen’s Garden (you must place tiles on your board next to existing tiles -- WRONG! Although this could make for a decent Expert variant.)
Betrayal at House on the Hill (moving into the tile you just explored is a separate action -- WRONG!)
Call to Adventure: The Stormlight Archive (rolling a crested moon on a Dark Runes stone gives 0 successes -- WRONG! (This would also apply to the original Call to Adventure game.)
Gloomhaven (monsters with any range numbers on their main monster reference card do a ranged attack every time they attack -- WRONG!)
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (enemies can shoot through walls -- WRONG! You can imagine why these effects of making the monsters more powerful would lessen our enjoyment of the game.)
The 7th Continent (you can only move 1 space when traveling -- WRONG!)
Tides (you can take 2 actions in High Tide -- WRONG! Although this could make for a decent Easy variant.)
Weather Machine (an experiment can only run when a matching weather type Experiment tile is in the same column as the Assistant bot -- WRONG!)
...And I’m sure there have been many more. Alright, look out soon for those mini-variants we actually like to use -- that at first we didn’t know were variants!
* “Wrong” meaning not following the rules supplied with the game. Of course that might be the “right” way for you to play it -- because the game is all about the experience, right? Just so you aren’t forcing yourself to crawl through a claustrophobic tunnel of constricted options.
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