Board Games

In Carcassonne you should draw a tile at the end of your turn, not the beginning. This helps with a bunch of other games, too.

We play Wingspan almost every day and we've added so many rules. We write in new point values and rules on individual cards. There aren't enough turns for us, so we each have one extra player, then a second extra for the final round. We each start with four bonus cards, and get to keep two of them. We deal 7 cards, you can keep 5. Or you can keep a 6th if you pay the nectar you'd normally start with. We seed the feeder with nectar for the first round. If you really hate either the bird cards or bonus cards you were dealt, you can trade in the entire hand for a new one, one time. Also, one time per game, if the bird feeder is really not working for you, you get a free reroll.

Not exactly a board game, but when we play Munchkin we have a house rule that says you can pick a door card OR a treasure card when you loot the room, instead of just a door card. Helps get more gear into the game early on and makes things go off the rails faster.

Going off memory, as we ran out of new people to play with and haven't replayed it in ages, but Fool's Blade had some balance issues, which we tried to fix with the following rules:

You must quest before you can fight, and you have to fight a higher level monster than the last one you fought (on loss, you could go back to lvl 1 enemies).

The quest deck felt pretty useless compared to the other ones, and there were more lvl 1 monsters with rewards than there were rewards, so you could win the game by getting 4 sword pieces and zerg rushing lvl 1 monsters.

"Don't get got" great game, lots of fun. Played sort of in the background of whatever you're doing. You try to get other players to do or say something according to your secret objectives.

There's a pretty vague official rule that if the other person becomes suspicious of you trying to trick them, they can just call you out and you lose the objective. But with my group you can't sneeze without someone going "Is that for the game? Because I'm not saying bless you." So our house rule is that they have to guess at least somewhat in the neighborhood of what you're objective is for you to fail.

It does make you get a little more creative about how you might trick them so that even if they're suspicious, they at least can't tell what your goal is.

Coup.

No one gets to look at their cards until they are called out.

Adds total random chaos as everyone is the duke the first round.

We made the green cards in Viticulture - the ones with the grapes on them - more of a market. So there's always two visible that you could choose from, or you could draw the top card of the deck.

You lose out, I suppose, on hiding a strategy where the other players don't know what you're going for, but I think it more than makes up for it by reducing the luck element of what grapes you're able to grow. We found that being dependent on the shuffle for both the grapes and the orders could make for a very frustrating game if you consistently had unlucky draws.

I've started playing 20-28 rounds of Agricola instead of the usual 14 because the players in my group feel like they're just getting into the groove of things during stage 5 of 6.

We also limit the total amount of sheep you can purchase to 6 because they usually breed too many and the points are capped at 8 sheep anyway. It's mostly to make sure people are diversifying enough to stay competitive and not suddenly find themselves really far behind because they forgot to focus on crops/other animals.

We usually play drunk or hungover and have new players joining every so often, so that's why. I want everyone to have fun.

The game is Silver, but we hate to see all those sets go to waste, so we created Super Silver.

We mixed ALL the decks together, and instead of reshuffling the deck in between rounds, the dead cards are set aside and you just keep going. If the deck is gone, the game is over. More surprises and variety this way.

In "Game of the Goose", we added an extra NPC. Our geese pieces are coloured, so either the yellow goose (the "piss goose") or the red goose (the "murder goose") would go around the board just like the players do. Except, they didn't get their own roll, they'd move on each player turn, advancing the number of spaces indicated by the lowest rolled die that the player rolled on their turn (eg a 2 and a 5 would see the player advance 7 and the piss/murder goose advance 2). If the piss/murder goose ends up on the same square as a player, that player goes back to the beginning.

If the piss/murder goose were to "win", they'd reset to the beginning but now advance using the higher die. If they'd win again, they'd advance by the sum of both dice. If they were to win for a third time, all players lose and nobody wins.

Just makes the otherwise slightly boring game a bit more tense/funny.

I'm not sure if this is more interesting, but we play 3-player ticket to ride with the double routes. This keeps the game from being cut throat and the kid has fun as well.

When playing Telestrations and most other party games, my groups never bother to keep score. The joy is in the activity (and the s prong rules are often garbage because playing to win is less fun than playing).

When playing Burke’s Gambit, we often leave out the Manual Laborer. It’s just a nothing kind or role.

Not really a home rule but as you may know, monopoly is a rip-off from another game named 'the landlord game'. The landlord game had two ways of being played, one of them being monopoly. This rule comes from the other way of playing the game: Utilities and Railroads, once purchased by a player, belong and benefit to every players.

Eels and escalators involved lots of house interpretation, but that's because they game doesn't feel like much effort went into making it unambiguous. Can't even think of any specific examples, but when in doubt on how cards interacted or what they do or whether they can be held for later, we generally just went with whatever seemed like it would be silly without much regards to balance or fairness. I think it took a couple games until we actually had someone win instead of just everyone dying.