Aaron Lawn: House Rules over time

Have you noticed the slow demise of house rules?  As recently as 15 years ago, anyone playing board games would be extremely likely to be using house rules for their games.  They would be gasp changing the rules to fit how they liked to play…

There’s a strong history of variants and house rules within games.  In times past, when games were less commercial or manufactured, games were taught and passed down through families.  While many people learned to play Pinochle or Whist or Charades, each family probably has a slight tweak on the rules.  Some played Pinochle with One deck of cards, some with two.  Families modified the scoring¹. 

As board games entered the first boom of publishing², changes to the rules became commonplace due to errata or simple lack of playtesting.  Wargames are such dense undertakings that many times they were unplayable without some minor or major adjustments.  So the players made the house rules.

The launch of Role-playing games spawned the biggest wave of house rules ever.  Early Roleplaying games told you to change the rules and gave the power to the GM to make up his/her own ideas and rules.

The board games that soared to popularity during the late twentieth century we also heavily modified by players.  Everything from Cosmic Encounter, Talisman, to Illuminati were likely to have one or three rules that were changed, ignored or added by a group of players.

I think that the early board game culture of expansions encouraged this behavior³.  Within Cosmic Encounter, there were so many expansions that two sets of the game were very likely to have different pieces.  By the time Mayfair did their all-inclusive reprint of the game, there were so many different tweaks to the game that the players could apply that adding in one of your own didn’t seem like a change.

Then gradually, the environment shifted.  Over the past 15 years board games and board game players have slowly become less accepting of house rules.  They are applied less frequently that before.  As players, we rarely modify our games.

Here’s my take on why.

1) The CCG factor.  Just like Roleplaying games, the launch of Magic and the subsequent CCG boom changed the face of published games.  This time, the popular format was a game that was opposite of RPGS.  CCGs provide the rules changes for the player.  Early on, some groups would modify rules, or make their own cards, but for the most part, CCGs didn’t lend themselves to house rules.  Since the games were complex enough, the core rules didn’t encourage tweaking.  More importantly, CCGs started to bleed player networks into one another.  Rarely did players sit down with strangers for a session of D&D.  But with Magic, interaction with players outside your own group increased.  Leading to…

2) Communication increase (exemplified by The InterNet).  Player bases were getting larger.  Communication between groups of players was more likely.  A small group of friends is much more likely to develop and maintain a set of house rules.  If you play games with many people, variants tend to decrease as a common ground is needed for discussion.

3) Video Games With the transition of hobby games into the electronic domain, the rules became inalterable⁴.  Modifications were only possible by rewriting the code, something that started hard and has become nigh-impossible.  There remains a sub-culture of variants based on the idea of Cheat Codes within games, but these are ultimately “Cheat Codes”, not variants.  If your base of gaming comes from the electronic world, the idea of altering rules is… impossible.

4) More Games Whether you call it the Eurogame boom, the Golden Age, or the transition to Consumable games, over the last 8 years, we have seen a proliferation of published and available games.  As the number of different games you play rises, the amount of times you play them decreases.  If you only play a game twice a year⁵, players are very unlikely to feel the need to modify the base game. 

So now, it’s rare to come across house rules in board games.  Variants are mostly likely in the big sprawling games that demand repeat play to understand or encourage the development of a small group of people who mostly play with each other⁶.  The other games that might get a house rule are those that get played over and over, such as the EuroGranddaddy, Settlers of Catan.

So.  Is this a problem?  Is the slow demise of variants and house rules a bad thing?

I wonder⁷.

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¹Obviously changes weren’t called house rules, or probably even variants.  It was just the rules you were taught, or a change that was made one summer because Dad didn’t like losing.

²There was obviously a split between what is best termed as Hobby games and Mass Market games.  I’m going to focus mostly on Hobby games, but it is worth noting that many of the Mass Market games went through the same cycle.  Early roll and move games based on TV shows usually needed some alteration to make games interesting.  The 1980ish boom of packaged party games (Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary) also kept house rules going, since these games were based on parlor games that many families already knew.  I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with a family that treated the Pink spaces just like roll again spaces!^2a

^2aNot that I minded.  I was horrible at pink.

³Coupled with the rise of Role-playing games.

⁴Of course, there was/is a whole genre of electronic games that encouraged changes to their rules and environments (epitomized by MUDs).  Sadly, these games haven’t progressed substantially, and certainly haven’t made it into the mainstream.

⁵Or, GASP, twice EVER…

⁶To use Descent from Fantasy Flight as the perfect example.  It takes several lengthy sessions to actually understand the game, so it forces repeat play and encourages you to always play with the same people.  Hence it is more likely to have a variant than.

⁷It could be said that the lack of variants is sucking the last vestiges of creativity out of one the few forms of entertainment that still allows it.  You can’t change a TV show, move or audio track.  You can’t alter the ending of a book.  While games certainly remain more interactive than any of the more common forms of entertainment, by discouraging changes to published games, we are removing one of the features that makes this form of entertainment truly unique.  But I don’t know if I’d say that.  –smile-

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