12
While I used to play with futures trading, I now explicitly prohibit it for the following reasons:
Problematic/ambiguous mechanics
Consider this case: I trade you a brick and a future wood for your wheat.
Later, you attempt to cash in the future trade, but I claim to have no wood. Unless it's obvious that I'm lying, there's no great way to determine ...
10
Doing a quick search for "chess" and "immobilizer" led me to Baroque Chess.
10
As per the the Official FMJD Rules for International Draughts, if the opponent notices that you have not captured as many pieces as possible, they may decide whether the move stands or if it must be taken back and made again.
5.4. If a player has committed one of the following irregularities, his opponent has the right to decide whether that irregularity ...
8
First, I agree that Mandatory Quests can be a little unbalancing. I've never played 2-player, but I can see how they could be even worse in that case. I've seen a handful of alternatives, any of which may work for you and your opponent:
Don't use them. Remove them from the Intrigue deck beforehand, or discard and draw again if you draw one during the game.
...
7
I would say not. The advantage to those on the ends of being able to place multiple pieces consecutively is far greater than the disadvantage of going last in this game, IME.
First, the single most successful opening strategy is to get across the board as fast as you can, so you don't end up boxed in to your corner of the board. It's been my experience that ...
6
There is an excellent article up by one of the Magic developers that discusses the issues with various mulligan types, and why they upgraded to the new "Vancouver" Scry 1 mulligan.
A quick summary:
The "cheaper" it is to mulligan, the more likely you are to do it. On digital, this is instantaneous. In paper, properly shuffling takes a lot longer, as does ...
6
One element that I haven't seen in any of the answers yet: a 'lenient' mulligan rule advantages some deck archetypes over others. Some decks are built on the concept of redundancy: for a mono-Red aggro or burn deck, for instance, there may be minor differences amongst its various one-mana creatures or its burn spells — maybe this spell does an extra ...
6
We own several versions and editions of the crayon rail games in my house. In each one that we have, there is a "Variants" section of the rules. One of the variants we always play with is the fast game. It has 5 main effects that I can think of offhand:
Increases starting cash by $20
Adds one additional pre-movement turn
Gives you 5 initial demand cards,...
6
"Snake Order" isn't that common in games, because getting 2 turns in a row is often a massive advantage. Usually the first player advantage is dealt with by rotating the starting player, so I'd suggest you try that.
Player order would be 1,2,3,4,2,3,4,1,3,4,1,2,4,1,2,3 then back to 1,2,3,4.
5
A variant much more similar to chess than Arimaa is Twilight Chess. Like Arimaa, the design goal is explicitly to be harder for computer to master. The creator is an Associate Professor is Computer Science and a very good chess player.
The rules are
All classical laws of chess apply.
Moving to the Twilight zone (Warp move) is a legal moves for all
...
5
You could draw a 2D array of 2D boards, like this:
▢▢▢ ▢▢▢ ▢b▢
aaa ▢▢▢ ▢▢▢
▢▢▢ ▢▢▢ ▢▢▢
▢▢▢ ▢▢▢ ▢▢▢
▢▢▢ ▢b▢ ▢▢▢
▢▢▢ ▢▢▢ ▢▢▢
c▢▢ ▢▢▢ ▢▢▢
▢▢▢ ▢c▢ ▢▢▢
▢b▢ ▢▢▢ ▢▢c
You'd probably want a 4x4 array of 4x4 boards, though I used 3s everywhere instead to make the example smaller. The example shows a few of the many winning lines (a-c). If it's not clear what ...
4
The answer to this depends a lot on why the game is taking you so long to play. We had been suffering from the same problem, and the main reason is because we have one player who is just an incredibly slow thinker. He often took over 15 minutes just to make one move.
Over time, we made a lot of small changes to the game to reduce the amount of information ...
4
I haven't played this game, but the rules seem fairly clear to me.
1) You can swap which character is covered, and which is exposed, each game turn. So they don't have to stay in the background.
At the beginning of any turn, after dealing with such cards as Jail
and Dynamite and before Phase 1, the active player chooses one
character to be exposed ...
4
Since this is too long for a comment, here's the way that I have played...
You can promise almost anything in a trade: future cards (not necessarily meeting a minimum one card per transaction rule...I.e. they could just be forked over), future trades, future protection from robber, future placement choice of robber, etc.
We have also introduced goods/...
4
We have a simple way of doing "future trades which we have successfully used in well over 100 games:
All Catan rules must be obeyed (trades only on your own turn, at
least 1 card offered by both parties)
When a legal trade is made, a future trade can be included as part of
the deal. So you can offer a brick and a "future trade" in return for
a wheat (you ...
4
There is no official 2-player variant; the game just wasn't designed for it.
But as always, the internet provides. Various fans have proposed two-player rule sets.
The Roland Wood variant is probably the most commonly used, building on earlier suggestions by other players.
(There was another popular version in the "Shattered Expansion", but I can no ...
4
There is a Go variant without boundaries (but, of course, on a finite board): Torus Go. It is sometimes played in Go clubs or as a side event on Go tournaments. On a traditional board I find it very hard to visualise.
4
There is a variant of war, called "Strategy War" or "Armed War" (a joke on hands) where, instead of pulling the card from the top of your deck, you chose it from your hand. This works as follows:
You shuffle the deck and deal it out in equal parts. Each player takes the cards dealt to him/her and puts them in his/her hand.
All cards a player plays and all ...
3
The main form of "future trades" we had tended to employ in the past is based on harbours, where if I have, say, a sheep harbour where I can trade 2:1, then somebody with a large supply of excess sheep may trade them to me in pairs on the condition that I use my harbour to swap them at a better rate for some other resource that I will then trade back to them ...
3
I am not an expert at 960 Chess, but the same basic rules apply: develop your pieces, take control of the center, and bring your king to safety as quickly as possible.
3
This isn't really a house rule per se, but it's especially helpful in speeding up the game when playing on a new board (or unfamiliar one).
Whenever a new demand card is drawn, read off and find all of the cities as quickly as possible. Everyone "competes" to find and point out each city first. This helps everyone learn the map better, as well as whomever ...
3
Been playing a fair bit of this over the weekend, so here's a few thoughts:
It seems that Story is a bit easier to get than Destiny (and there's a couple effects that convert Destiny to Story, plus some that remove Destiny), so I tend to skew a few points towards Story. I haven't seen a particular reason to skew too far away (the furthest I've gone is D7/...
3
There is a Campaign mode on the board game geek website http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/27501/arkham-horror-campaign-rules but as I read them I am trying to think of a way to set it so that the board don't get cleared between every round, to were the gates and the monsters stay on the board or something but when me and my friends tried it the second set ...
3
Little Wars is not by any stretch of the imagination likely to constitute a watertight ruleset (give it a break, it was the first of its kind!) so I think we have to apply a bit of common sense to ruling on this issue. I quote from the text:
Moreover, in our desire to bring the game to a climax, we decided that
instead of a fight to a finish we would ...
3
It's Ultima
King, represented by the King.
Withdrawer, represented by the Queen.
Chameleon, represented by the Bishop.
Long Leaper, represented by the Knight.
Coordinator, represented by the Rook.
Immobilizer, represented by the Rook, placed on its head.
Pawn, represented by the Pawn.
Object is to checkmate the King
3
This depends on the exact variant of checkers you're talking about. In the primary version played in the US, the forced capture rule says that you must make captures if possible, but lets the player arbitrarily choose between capturing moves (emphasis mine):
1.20 All capturing moves are compulsory, whether offered actively or passively. If there are two ...
3
There are variants like 3 dimensional Go, which may be interesting to you. However, from personal experience as well as seeing higher dans struggle, I'd guess humans are far worse at them than computers :)
I'm not aware of any kind of "infinite" Go that is even remotely playable. The basic problems are ladders, which need to end, and counting, which ...
3
This variant seems to have been introduced with the Harbor Expansion and I'm not sure it would work well with just the base game. It's a way to avoid having only low (resp. high) numbered buildings when using the draw cards rule (instead of having all the buildings available at once).
The idea is apparently to split the deck into 3 decks :
one with the ...
3
It sounds like it might be Margo, except that Margo is played on a 7X7 grid, not 9X9. Per the linked website by Cameron Browne:
Two players, White and Black, each have at least enough marbles of
their colour to cover the board.
Start: The board is initially empty. White places the first piece at
any board point, then Black may elect to swap ...
3
This sounds like it's equivalent to Clock Patience, but with a less space-consuming layout and using the aces as the starter pile rather than the kings. I've also seen it referred to as "Travellers".
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