Page 32 - spielbox 03/21 - English

Essay. House rules
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“Go directly to jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.“
Probably everybody knows these sentences on one of the Monopoly Event cards. Multiple player generations may – at least once – have gotten annoyed about these instructions and have grumpily put the bills back into the bank.
At some point, my two sons got fed up with this; so they came up with the
idea to simply place all the money you have to pay to the bank in
the middle of the gameboard. They decided that you receive
this pot on the “Free Parking“ corner space as soon as you land on
it. After all, there isn‘t anything else happening on that space; therefore, this would be a good idea. My first reaction was that I considered this special rule completely unbalanced and unfair. Then it struck me that we were talking about Monopoly – and I laughed at myself.
By MANUEL FRITSCH
But lo and behold, with this minor rule change – so natural that players have actually used it for decades – the two boys had more fun with the
game and the prospect of gaining the jackpot even cre- ated more suspense.
This episode made me think of how the game scene actually deals with house rules, that means, with mod- ifications and tweaks of the predefined rules construct.
What are the pros and cons? And how do game au- thors take it if their game is played with house
rules?
The primary reason that there are so many
house rules and variations for tabletop games at all is that, in most of all cases, the game rules are explained orally. This inevitably leads to er- rors, and such errors can inadvertently bring in new variations. This is particularly evident in regional card game variants that often vary widely in some details but are clearly
based on one and the same basic game.
It‘s probably for this very reason that the majority
of the world‘s population has always played the card game Uno incorrectly, strictly speaking. So it aroused great astonishment when the publisher, Mattel, re- minded players via Twitter that they are not allowed to play a “+4“ card right after a “+2“ card, or vice versa
Fun with Break
ing the Rules
Photos: Becker, Fritsch, Palina Rojisnki (@rojinski), Florian Schulz