It makes the game exciting for the first two or three times the strategic thing happens. Then it is extremely tedious and boring. I once witnessed a game with all the house rules at a party. People just started to look around for someone to give their hand to, as they were missing the rest of the party. The game went on for over two hours at which point none of the players left had started the game. Eventually everyone just placed the cards on the table and walked away. It got just too mind numbly dull and mechanic. There’s videos online of uno games that lasted over 6 hours because of these rules, and they’re absolute torture.
I have nothing against house rules, as long as they are balanced and fun for all players. But the typical house rules are created by overtly competitive players who want to optimize the fun out of games and maximize their potential for being cruel towards other players.
Yep. See Monopoly for another example. A game should only take about an hour to play by the rules but there are so many ubiquitous house rules that keep players in with random windfalls of cash.
Oh god, I refuse to play monopoly altogether unless it is strictly by vanilla rules. As soon as someone mentions free money if you fall on free parking I sarcastically claim “but that’s socialism!” and demand we switch to Catan instead.
I can stop you right at “I refuse to play monopoly altogether”
That’s where I’m at. Game sucks. Yeah it’s a great illustration of how capitalism fucks most people but whatever.
I got Catan years ago and I’ve only played it once. Everyone refused to trade and it ruined the game. My extremely competitive friend got mad he was losing and we just shut it down.
I’m with you on Monopoly. I will not play it. Both because it sucks as a game (by design!—it was intended to suck!) and because it’s a rip-off of the landlord game which was designed to suck to show how bad capitalism is.
I enjoyed playing Catan a couple of times until I saw one pattern: in any game there’s seemingly always one poor schmuck who gets shafted within the first two turns and can’t quit the game, but has no hope of doing anything except forlornly asking if anybody wants to trade wheat or some other low-grade trade item that nobody else is really trading for any longer. It’s just a badly designed game.
It makes the game exciting for the first two or three times the strategic thing happens. Then it is extremely tedious and boring. I once witnessed a game with all the house rules at a party. People just started to look around for someone to give their hand to, as they were missing the rest of the party. The game went on for over two hours at which point none of the players left had started the game. Eventually everyone just placed the cards on the table and walked away. It got just too mind numbly dull and mechanic. There’s videos online of uno games that lasted over 6 hours because of these rules, and they’re absolute torture.
I have nothing against house rules, as long as they are balanced and fun for all players. But the typical house rules are created by overtly competitive players who want to optimize the fun out of games and maximize their potential for being cruel towards other players.
So it’s like monopoly house rules which only serve to extend the time the game takes and then no one wants to play because it takes too long.
Yep. See Monopoly for another example. A game should only take about an hour to play by the rules but there are so many ubiquitous house rules that keep players in with random windfalls of cash.
Oh god, I refuse to play monopoly altogether unless it is strictly by vanilla rules. As soon as someone mentions free money if you fall on free parking I sarcastically claim “but that’s socialism!” and demand we switch to Catan instead.
I can stop you right at “I refuse to play monopoly altogether”
That’s where I’m at. Game sucks. Yeah it’s a great illustration of how capitalism fucks most people but whatever.
I got Catan years ago and I’ve only played it once. Everyone refused to trade and it ruined the game. My extremely competitive friend got mad he was losing and we just shut it down.
I’m with you on Monopoly. I will not play it. Both because it sucks as a game (by design!—it was intended to suck!) and because it’s a rip-off of the landlord game which was designed to suck to show how bad capitalism is.
I enjoyed playing Catan a couple of times until I saw one pattern: in any game there’s seemingly always one poor schmuck who gets shafted within the first two turns and can’t quit the game, but has no hope of doing anything except forlornly asking if anybody wants to trade wheat or some other low-grade trade item that nobody else is really trading for any longer. It’s just a badly designed game.
Did one of those rules include allowing to use any special card, like the reverse, if the previous card was anything other than a number?
I don’t remember the details, I just remember everyone pitched in their own house rule and they all just accepted them all.