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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Customized Family Games
OK, I don't know what's happening here. I am actually about to post about something sort of useful and factual. I think my body has been taken over by my 2005 self, or something. If you don't hear anything frivolous and completely useless from me by next week, please come rescue me. Or wait, I was thinner in 2005. Nevermind.
Anyway. I was Stumbling (stumbleupon = single greatest timewaster ever invented, aside from computer Solitaire and the Internet itself), and I came to this site where there was a discussion of customized rules for games. I don't KNOW those people, so I don't want to post there ;), but I thought, hmm. THAT's an interesting topic for a blog post. Everyone plays games, right?
(ooh, goody, a list!)
- The most major updates we've given to any of our games are in the game of Life, which C got for Christmas. We make three changes, based on actual ideological/economic issues with the game. First, we noticed that having kids is absolutely no benefit at ALL in that game, other than the one LIFE card you get when they're born. They cost you money for college and daycare and they ride around in your car with you, and that's it. Since money is the only way of gauging your quality of life in that game (!), we made each child worth 50,000 when you retire. We've thought about making a square where you had to spend all your savings on a nursing home if you didn't have at least 2 kids to care for you, but we haven't tried it yet.
- Also for Life, we found their real estate program to be completely unrealistic. That you could buy a house in your twenties and sell it at retirement for only about one and a half times what you paid for it at best was ludicrous. Come on, we live in California, we know how this goes. So we decided that if you keep your house from the first "buy a house" square till the end, you double the amount printed on the card when you sell it. If you buy it at the second "buy a house" square, or if you sell and buy again, you use the amounts printed. Also, you pay $10,000 rent per payday, which you no longer have to pay once you have bought a house. (there it virtually no benefit at all built into the game for homeowners).
- Some friends of my parents taught them to play "dirty UNO". I am not crazy-fond of the extra rules, but I am in the minority on that, so when we play, we play "dirty", as follows: Whenever anyone plays a zero, then everyone passes their cards to next person in the direction of play. Anyone who plays a 7 may trade cards with any player. If a card of the same color and number is played on top of a card that you placed (say, you play a blue 9 and the next person to put down a card plays a blue 9), you draw that number (9) of cards.
- We adopted the "doubles" rules from Star Wars Monopoly for all games of Monopoly, which makes the game a lot more fun. (I really don't much like Monopoly, personally, so every little bit helps). If you roll double 1s, you can move to any space on the board. Double 2s, you get $100 from the bank. Double 3s, you get $50 from each player. Double 4s, you get a Community Chest card. Double 5s, you get a Chance card. Double 6's, you can challenge any other player for any one of his/her properties; each rolls a die and the higher one gets/keeps the property. And of course we put money from taxes etc. into the middle, and anyone who lands on Free Parking gets them. Who doesn't do that? I was shocked when I found out that wasn't an official rule.
- T and I have a more complicated version of Battleship where you fire a salvo of shots on each turn depending on how many ships you have on the board -- I think it's one shot per undamaged ship. We've talked about working movement into it -- where you can move each undamaged ship one space per turn -- but that would get so complicated and long and frustrating that we've never actually done it.
- LT came up with the idea to step up our Clue games a bit by adding more people and more weapons, and by designating more "rooms" on the board (the staircase in the middle, and maybe some areas in the hallways). The thing is that we have to get more cards just like ours to customize, if this is going to work, so that the backs of the cards all look the same. Then we found out that Clue had done essentially that for us in the late 80's, with their Master Detective version, which was, inexplicably, only made for a few years. We're hoping to buy a copy on eBay.
There are so many websites with ideas for this kind of thing; this is only the teeniest tip of the iceberg of possibilities. So what do you do to make games more fun?
Comments
I remember changing a lot of the rules for LIFE. It ended up being quite dirty, but not in the way you're thinking ;-)
Posted by: jenn at March 27, 2007 04:31 PM
They don't give you money anymore for having kids in Life? Our edition (admittedly old, from when I was little) gave you $48k for each kid at the end, I think. We have a newer version but never play because we don't like how they changed it.
We had the fancy version of Clue, too. It's still at my parents' house. It had some nifty rooms and a secret passage and you can even go outdoors. We also had a really cool game called Stop Thief where you had to listen to clues -- how many times the thief walked, or broke glass, or stole something. Highly recommended if you can find it!
Posted by: Anonymous at March 27, 2007 05:44 PM
Ooops, that one above is from me. I had some Issues with posting after preview.
Posted by: mary at March 28, 2007 07:21 AM
I always loved playing Clue, but with just the two of us, it's not quite the same as it was in a family of five. ;o) I'd never heard of the Master Detective version, but that does sound neat.
If you can't find the enhanced version or some duplicates of your cards to play around with, you could always make a whole new set of cards out of thick paper or cardstock. (If they're *all* handmade, you wouldn't be able to see which ones were "new".) It's not quite as nice as having the "real" cards, of course.
Posted by: Michael ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.1970dodgecharger500.com/oldsite/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 28, 2007 11:05 AM
