Though this is satire, we’ve all had that experience where we played a game (many times, even!) and only found out later that we got the rules massively wrong. Share your experience!
relevant nedroid
My SOs family played a lot of games kind of weirdly, they explained the rules to me, so I just joined and kept quiet at first, not to be a buzzkill.
For instance, they mixed Exploding Kittens two decks of cards, and some cards never did anything. Which felt weird. So after like third session I looked up the rules, and found out you can use two- and three-of-a-kind to pull cards from other players! It’s not like they decided not to use them, they just never knew.
Since then, I always read the rules, no matter what they tell me. And lo and behold, the games are even more fun now.
That’s what you get for paying out previously-collected fees when people land on “free parking,” failing to auction off property that the person who first landed on it didn’t want, or using other house rules to try to make Monopoly “fair” and “fun.”
If the first person who gets lucky enough to complete a property group doesn’t quickly and ruthlessly grind his opponents down into bankruptcy and make them hate both the game and capitalism itself, you’re doing it wrong.
People seem to forget the point of monopoly is as a social commentary to make you hate capitalism, rather than an RPG in which you learn all the things that make capitalism great.
The game is unbalanced and broken on purpose, if it is fair and everyone has an equal shot you aren’t playing monopoly
Eh, there’s an argument to be made that most of the common house rules do a better job of making people hate capitalism and the game :)
Every single time I’ve played Uno with a different group of people, they all have varying interpretations of the stated rules and also throw in random house rules that everyone in each group acts like everyone everywhere has always had, and are official rules.
The actual written rules are the same, every time, and I point out to each group that they’re either misinterpreting the stated rules, or their house rule isn’t actually anywhere in the stated rules, and every time, each group has been confused but ultimately just decides their rules are better anyway.
I have come to the conclusion that either only idiots play Uno, or I have only ever played Uno with idiots.
TBF, base UNO is (imo) pretty bland and feels like a very generic card game. It’s not surprising house rules have gotten as popular as they have for it.
Its actually by design but UNO did not understand this when they copied it, which is why they have expressed to be against house rules. It (no joke) threatens there existence.
If you look up the history of UNO you find it is derived from a cardgame called crazy eights which itself is derived from a german card game called Mau-Mau.
The wikipage for mau-mau even mentiones uno as a proprietary variant.
The killer detail is that almost every nation had its own variant, house rules where a part of games culture.
Its also related to the game Mao which does not have a defined set of rules.
All this to say Uno is not at all a unique game and having variants is part of the natural evolution of this game. The only thing UNO really did was change out the common playing cards to their own graphics and pretended it was a distinct and patentable game.
I’m fine with house rules.
I’m not fine with unstated house rules that pop up randomly, nor with seemingly everyone not even knowing that they are using a house rule.
So many games of Uno I’ve been in involve everyone discovering they are used to playing by different house rules, 10 or 20 minutes into a game, and then everyone discussing or arguing about which house rule is better.
… If you aren’t actually playing by the stated rules, and you’re randomly invoking new rules and then arguing over them… you’re playing calvin ball.
All of this can be avoided if people actually state the house rules before a game, but in my experience, almost no one does.
In the same way with any other light / party game, you’re lucky if even one person at the table has ever read the actual rulebook. Given that, it’s not surprising everybody thinks they’re playing UNO the ‘right’ way.
Also: Calvinball is amazing.
Unsurprising, but mildly infuriating to my autistic ass.
I consider penny poker, or blackjack/21, to be light party games.
Been playing those games with friends and family since I was a kid.
Texas Hold’em rules for poker, declared at the start.
Either very low or no stakes, you either literally play with pennies, or just everyone gets say 50 completely worthless plastic chips, or just nothing.
If most people were in such a texas holdem or blackjack game and then started inventing or arguing over rules… this would generally be very obviously viewed as bullshit, unnaceptable, not normalized.
But… with Uno… this is not the case.
Its the latter. But the former seems accurate because while non-idiots have played UNO, it is not typically a game they would choose. Where as UNO is at everyone’s house who believes it is the best game ever.
Could we perhaps sythensize or evolve what I’ve said and what you’ve said into:
If Uno is your favorite game, you’re likely not that bright?
If I agree I’m going to throw a family member under the bus ;)
This happened to me during a game of The Thing. The owner of the game failed to remember that you are supposed to draw cards up to a specific amount each round. The game has a secret traitor. Each round you can either help or sabotage a mission. We kept being forced to sabotage at random times because it was all we had in our hand.
We fucked up multiple rules in pandemic: legacy and realized in November.
What rule did you miss?
It was something huge about negative consequences that we didn’t carry from month to month, I don’t remember exactly.
Okay… Is that part of the legacy rules or after you saying you started playing in November so it’s been 3 months ish?
So legacy games are like a campaign you play over a series of sessions. Each session is it’s own game that lasts several hours. So you play a game, then next time you play it, it continues from where you left off, but with a bunch of changes (you open new packets and such). In pandemic each of these sessions are named after a month, so they were on the 11th session of the playthrough.
Yes thank you, i have done both pandemic legacy and betrayal Legacy so far, i just wondering how long many actual days but in hand time, so just saying November could have never just the date November 2024
I belive each game is a month of the calendar.
After a whole playthrough of gloomhaven and Jotl, we finally learned in Frosthaven that crit and negate cards reshuffle the whole deck, not just that card. Same for ability cards. Our games normally ended with the minion deck either always critting, or missing. We justified it by thinking it was an intended clock by the developers, to make sure the end was extra difficult… all those games are such a breeze now :p
Only reshuffle at the end of the turn or if you run out of cards.
Oof, that’s crazy. And AN ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGH. Of a 1-2 year campaign!
We got SkyTeam last October. It’s a two player, limited communication game where each person has four dice to play on the game board.
After about a dozen sessions, we had to look up a rule and noticed that we were supposed to take turns placing one die each, we’ve been placing all four at a time… Some other rules are making much more sense now too 🤦
Most recently, I played half a dozen games of Unconscious Mind. After almost every session, we found a rule we got wrong the last game. The last one was finding out you can’t have multiple ideas from a player pointing at the same action. In my defense… the game is OK, but the rulebook is horribly disorganised. Major rules are stuck in the middle of random paragraphs.
Ah my gf just got it in kickstarter and we haven’t played it yet. I usually solo new games but I haven’t had the time recently. Before Uncouncious Mind, my gf kickstartered Pest and let me tell you after 3 attempts I haven’t been able to figure out how to get past turn 2. And I like GMT’s MBT and the likes.
