I played the base game of Vikings once.  It was okay, not as interesting as the full game.  (I won pretty easily, too.)

Playing Age of Steam, the base rule for the Production action is that you draw two cubes and place them, but I nearly always play that you draw three, placing two and returning one to the cup.  (I’ve even heard of people playing that you draw four.)

I’ve had terrible trouble playing variants in the past - on no occasion can I ever recall someone proposing a rules variant and having all the players unanimously agree that it ought to be used. So I’ve pretty much given up trying to use them and I just play the rules as written.

Do you think the trend toward a 5-10 play shelf life for a lot of modern titles is good, bad or indifferent?

While I rarely play in the same games as you, I fairly regularly play beside you, such as tonight where you played Android and I played 1889.

I prefer FFG’s less-forgiving rules for Through the Desert.  It adds a little value to advance planning and incentive estimation that I enjoy.

I’ll only play Torres with the all-cards-in-hand master rules.  That’s where the game shines for me.  Playtimes grow a bit, yeah, but it is well worth it.

The Tikal business may be another divide between the North and South Bay gaming groups.  In the southern groups the overwhelming consensus seems to be that only the auction game is worth playing and that it dwarfs the base game to the point of irrelevancy.  I’m not a great fan of Tikal in either version and so sit on the fence.

I used to play the 3-cube Production action in Age of Steam.  Then I played a few hundred games of Age of Steam and more importantly did the numerical analysis for the game.  I don’t see the change as either significant or noticeably valuable: the action is fine as-written.

The biggest change I make in games is a simple and consistent one: If a resource is trackable it is open, no matter what the game rules say.  There are many examples of this ranging from money in Container (where Chris Farrell and I disagree heartily) to cubes in Keythedral (I play without the player shields) or money in Imperial.  I leave it all open, always, and subject to player inspection and query.  About the only except I make is cards in trick-taking card games and the like.  I’d prefer to leave the history of played cards and so forth open, and prefer the games played that way (eg Land Unter), but the history and culture of card counting and hidden cards in card games is more than I want to argue with most times.

I’ve been fighting the culture of 3-5 plays for a few years now.  At any time I’ll have 2-3 games in my game crate that I’m trying to keep in heavy rotation.  Typically I play one of those 2-3 games 2-3 times a week for several months before bringing another game into that same fast rotation loop.  I usually rotate games out somewhere between 10 and 20 plays.  There are always exceptions, for instance I’ve played Wabash Cannonball almost 70 times in the last year. 

A more general result is that I don’t play that many different games each year, but I sure tend to play a lot of the ones I do play.  For instance so far this year I have 5 games I’ve played more than 20 times each in the year (5 if I had one more game of Container) and another 8 that are over 10 plays in the year with 3 more hovering just outside at 9 plays in the year.

We played Mamma Mia incorrectly due to misread rules (we played either an ingredient OR an order, not both).  When we played it the correct rule, it was far too easy and everyone filled all their orders and it was no fun.  So now we play either/or.

I prefer the simple map for Hacienda for everything but 3 players.

Torres, the basic rules are draw one card from a stack of ALL the cards.  Advanced rules are draw three keep one from your OWN stack, master rules are all 10 in your hand.  I prefer the draw 3 keep one, as it makes for tougher decisions.  There are too many action points when holding all 10 cards inn your hand.

The basic game in Vikings is fine, and I know many people the prefer it.  I’m fine with it either way, and I think it’s a great game.

I prefer Cartagena with our wrong rule for long time. We play you can only go back to a place with 1 or 2 pirates as usual but you are not allowed to PASS a place with 3 pirates. It adds a nice blocking aspect to the game.

Vikings has two elements in the advanced rules, the auction and the special tiles.  My group seemed to prefer using the special tiles in the advanced rules but no auction as it slowed the game down too much.

"I’ve never met anyone who even considered playing the auction variant of (Tikal).”
-We should meet.

Serenissima: The original translation of the rules say that you don’t gain income when selling to your own port.  This is a much better game than the final translation.  Money is tighter and players now have a tradeoff between selling to their own port for VP’s or selling to other ports for money.

El Grande: The published rules have power cards played starting with the lowest previous card and continuing clockwise.  The original Kramer rules have you do it fully in ascending order.

Generally, in games where players bid to go first or last, sometimes play then continues clockwise.  I prefer to handle it in order of bid.  Die Macher is an example.  In this case, players get to choose.

Leonardo da Vinci: Strong opinion on this one.  As written, if people produce a work at the same time, they bid to take ownership of it, paying the bank.  This puts an extreme premium on being the sole producer of an item.  Instead, players should bid, but the payment should go to the other players in that auction.  This effectively splits the value.

Industria: We played this last night and agreed that the player who goes fourth should start with an extra dollar.

Wow, some serious differences of opinion on how to do variants, Shannon!

Carcassonne - To me, the original farmer rules are clearly the best (that’s why HiG came up with them in the first place), particularly when played more seriously.  I have no interest in using the later, dumbed-down variants.  This can be problematic with some of the expansions, but I only play with Inns & Cathedrals, so no worries.

Coloretto - I thought you were going to suggest taking the wild cards out of the deck.  If I had my druthers, this would be my preference, as they are *always* taken right away--they’re just too powerful not to.

Goa - Agree completely.  The mistranslation was unfortunate and the game is clearly better with the proper rules.

Hacienda - I also prefer the asymetrical map, but disagree strongly about the variants.  The basic rules are fine for a couple of games, but then you notice that everyone favors huge tracts of land, the animals are rarely used, and the game starts to bog down.  The first variant solves all those problems and makes for a much more balanced game with many more viable strategies.  If you’re playing the game seriously, it’s simply the best way to play.  Variant 2 doesn’t appear to add anything and can be easily ignored.

Tikal - I guess you’ve never met me!  Tikal is good enough to play with the basic version, but just about every serious fan of the game *I’ve* ever met insists on using the auctions.  It eliminates a great deal of luck, adds a bunch of interesting decisions, and adds surprisingly little time to the game.  Auctions all the way, baby!

Union Pacific - Yeah, there really doesn’t appear to be any consensus on the best way to buy UP cards, just that the original rules aren’t the way to go.  I don’t have strong feelings about this one and have found most of the variants to work.  I’ll even use the given rules, as I don’t think they hurt the game too much.

Vikings - I’m with you with this one.  The Advanced rules add a great deal to the game with little additional complexity.

As for other variants I like to play with, probably the most significant ones are for all-time great party game Time’s Up!  This is the way I was taught the game and I think it makes it fairer, friendlier, and more skillful:

1. Passing is allowed on the first round.  Purists may shudder, but with good players, getting stuck with a name neither player has heard on round 1 pretty much means the game is over for you--you’re just giving away too many points.  Passing reduces this bit of bad luck and rewards skillful play.

2. The guesser doesn’t have to get the name *exactly* right.  “Gandhi” and “Martin Luther King” are sufficient; you don’t have to wait to hear “Mohandas Gandhi” or “Martin Luther King, Jr.”.  Why would you play any differently in a friendly game?

3. When a team guesses the last name of a round, set the timer on its side and let them begin the next round with the leftover time.  This stops the silly situation where you’re rooting for the previous team to get that last name, so that you aren’t stuck with a 1 point round.  Again, just a fairness issue.

We’ve had great success with these changes and I when I’m forced to play with the original rules (usually at a convention), I find I miss them.

Coloretto - Variant: You have to assign the wildcard to the color when you get it.

Leonardo - Really nice one, Jonathan - That might get me to play it again.

Liar’s Dice - If you have not bid and the bid is exactly what everyone has when called, you don’t lose a die.

Variants courtesy of Petergames

Clarification on Goa:  Do you mean to discard down to your hand limit and then draw, then discard again, or discard _below_ your limit and then draw so that you don’t ever go above your hand limit during the action?

I rarely play with variant rules, although I tend to be very forgiving about easily corrected oversights/mistakes in learning games.  (I don’t mind “takebacks” in order to help someone have a more enjoyable game.)

Discard below your limit before you draw, Matt.  You can never go above the hand limit, even temporarily.  With the incorrect rule, not only are the cards overpowered, the endgame bonuses get too high and your last few actions are often just drawing cards.

As a fledgling designer, I love card games for the simple fact that it is a relatively simple matter to adjust the gameplay rules. In terms of a system, cards can represent symbols, operations or both. The real magic is in the rules that bring everything together. As long as the cards are generic enough, there is virtually no end to the possibilities.

Battlefields of Olympus, a card game I recently developed, is a straightforward game system with a small number of relatively generic cards. But the number of interactive battle game variants are potentially endless.

I’m not sure there is a canonical set of rules for Liar’s Dice.  Isn’t every permutation just another variation?  There are so many.  My preference is:

0) No board
1) Ones are wild unless the bid starting the round is in terms of ones.
2) Before raising the bid a player may set out some of their dice publicly, raise the bid and then re-roll the remainder of their dice (they may not set out their last die)
3) Only one die lost for being wrong

I’m notorious for takebacks.  Far too often the Doh! moment only strikes after I see the move before me.  The subject of takebacks and forgiveness was recently interestingly discussed on the Yahoo! 18XX list.  The general view there was that takebacks were definitely acceptable if they were obvious oversights (of course he was going to buy a train, he’d clearly been setting up for that and it was the glaringly obvious move but he forgot to) and were usually acceptable even one or two player’s/company’s turns later as long as none of the intervening decisions were clearly affected by the previous indecision (You meant to lay this tile way over there instead of that tile, and everyone else has been messing about at the other end of the board and there are no tile shortages?  Go for it.) Once decisions started to stack and express clear dependencies the waters got murky. 

Perhaps in self-defence, I’m more lenient than most of the people I play with.  My general view is that outside of the obvious oversight, once there is a decision-dependency or more than a handful or so of significant game decisions have been made (nice precise value), it can’t be rolled back/redone.  However until that point rollbacks are fair game as long as not abused too often (another precise value: too often).

In some of our local games we’ve instituted the practice of knocking; essentially an explicit commit.  Your turn is over and can’t be unrolled after you’ve knocked.  Prior to the knock you may rollback and re-do your turn.

"I’ve never met anyone who even considered playing the auction variant of this Kramer & Kiesling game. It’s got plenty of depth as it stands.”

I’ve only ever played the auction version.

As regards variants, I’m generally against for another reason - it creates mutually unintelligible dialects. This is particularly bad when you play with various different groups.

Off the top of my head, some of the rare exceptions are:

Puerto Rico, everyone I know now plays “rollback” if it’s forgotten to put colonists in the ship.

Ace Caesar, I don’t even know exactly what the “true” rules are, everyone has their own combination of a few non-standard but widely used options.

Cluedo, there’s an “i.e.” in the rules that definitely should be read as an “e.g.” for a good game. (Never played any other way.) And an automatic die roll of 6 is an improvement too.

Balloon Cup:
We play with the rule that if you are to play a given card on an opponent’s side of a hop, you must have already played the corresponding card on your side. This is a compromise between the rules as written and the author’s original rule which was that you had to fill up your entire side of a hop prior to playing on your opponent’s side. We find that it preserves the meaning of the low/high hop cycle and makes for more difficult decisions.

Carcassonne: 3 points for farmers all the way.

Lots of variants are found, with votes, in this geeklist:

http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/30317

You can see that for Union Pacific, limited shares is more popular than unlimited, and must-exchange is more popular than can-take-directly.

The most popular option for Vikings is to use the special tiles but not the auctions.

I like the published variant rule for pirates in Manila (as do most, apparently).