Any games you play that you play “wrong” i.e. not necessarily in the manner the developers intended?
For example, I recently purchased a video game called theHunter: Call of the Wild. It was on sale on Steam for 70% off.
Anyways, I’m not an IRL hunter and it turns out I don’t really care for killing virtual animals, either, especially for the purpose of hanging their head on the wall. I mean, I get it, it’s a video game, you can’t exactly eat them, but still, I just don’t like that. If I’m going to virtually hunt and murder anything, it’s going to be people (hence my love for the Sniper Elite games).
However, it turns out the game is actually a pretty good “nature hike simulator,” as the maps are huge, extremely detailed, and very good looking, and there’s plenty of things to do in the game without ever killing anything.
I have all of my pinball machines set for 5 balls. Not really “wrong” or the factory wouldn’t have given me that option, but the standard for every machine since 1990 is 3 balls.
I ran a Blood Bowl league online (specifically Blood Bowl 2 from Cyanide) and we had an informal, “Don’t unduly rough up the other team when you have a noteworthy advantage,” rule.
Stamping on the other team’s players is normal in conventional gameplay and making characters specialized in maiming or death is kind of also normal, because the only way your defensive players can meaningfully improve is by injuring their opponents.
I rather enjoyed the league but I didn’t miss herding the cats to get games sorted out in a timely manner.
Never mind the “Free Parking” rule; the official rule most people ignore is the one that whenever someone declines to buy a property, it gets put up for auction. Playing the game the “right” way in this respect vastly changes the nature of the game.
The couple of times I’ve played Cards Against Humanity, we haven’t bothered to keep score, because the fun of the game isn’t really meaningfully impacted by having a defined winner.
And this may not count, because I also play the game “normally”, but in the MMO I’m playing now, City of Heroes, I have a character who literally never deals damage, and never teams up with anyone else who deals damage. He’s currently up to something like level 32 (out of a level cap of 50).
I have won Fortnite by actually not killing anyone … of the last 7 people 4 killed each other one killed himself in a bad jump off his really tall building and the guy who was trying to kill me couldn’t outrun the storm … hence I won
another time I’ve one by just killing one other player …
most of the time I advance by trying to do the goals …
This isn’t playing wrong as much as making up my own rules where none are precisely given. I played Geoguessr a lot several years ago. This year I’ve played it a few times, but you’re only allowed to play it for free now a few times each day. It’s an online game where each time you play, you’re shown one of the images shot at the location by Google Map’s vehicles. (So the image can be anywhere in the world where Google Maps’ vehicles have shot pictures on the places in their maps.) You’re allowed to travel as far as you want along the route that the vehicles traveled while they were shooting pictures of where they were. Eventually you have to guess precisely where you were when you were shown the first image (which you do by clicking on a point somewhere in the world). You get points depending on how close you are (straight line) to the actual place.
They don’t specify how long you can take to figure out where you are. They don’t specify how far you can travel before you figure out where you are. They don’t specify how much online searching (using Google or whatever) you can do before you figure out where you are. So I take my time, using every resource I can to figure out where I am. It often takes fifteen minutes or so before I make my guess. I still don’t always guess quite right. I have been almost precisely right sometimes, but sometimes I don’t even get on the correct continent. I suspect that many people when they play Geoguessr, only look at the first image they see and immediately make a guess with no research allowed.
I play two-suite spider solitaire with unlimited use of the undo button. It removes any luck element and makes it into a pure puzzle game where I’m allowed to click-click-click, which is more satisfying than agonizing over a choice which might be between two dead ends anyway. I usually win in about 10-15 minutes, which I find is the ideal amount of time for a mental break.
There’s a phone game I play called Monkey Wrench. Kind of a twist on a word search game, I guess. All the letters are used and the word wraps around any direction, though. I’m not explaining it well, but it’s a good game.
Anyway, there are easy/medium/hard settings. Easy gives you the categories and tells you the words you’re looking for. Medium gives you the categories and tells you the first letters and word lengths. Hard just gives you the categories and word lengths. I collapse the whole word menu thing, though, and try to find the words with no clues at all. And give myself a mental bonus if I can figure out some of the categories, although that’s not always possible.
I haven’t played Monopoly in years, and even then it was by the ubiquitous crap rules everybody plays, but I don’t remember anyone ever declining to buy a property in a game with 4+ players. The exhaustion of the intial money comes way past the point where every property has been landed on once and everybody I ever played with, (including me), always bought every time.
This is because people aren’t strategizing correctly. Some properties are not worth their face value. You can decline to buy a property and bid on it yourself. Don’t ask me what the correct strategies are, the above is just what I’ve been told by more advanced players.
In general, you only pass on a property if you aren’t liquid enough or if all the other competitors can’t manage more than the face value in an auction so you can get it for less than that.
Back in Skyrim, I would do everything I could to avoid the development track that turned your character into an unstoppable one-shot killing machine, because the game got boring at that point and I’d start a new character. I tried a Block build, I tried non-violence, I went ultimate stealth, I tried to search the entire map without killing anything…
My wife and I play Rummikub wrong. We don’t do any of the scoring part of the game, but simply play until one of us “goes out”. First one out wins.
We do require 30+ points for the first lay of the game.
We also began taking out the smiley-wild-card tiles as it threw the game into too much swing if one player gets them. We considered each of us taking one, but we are happier without them.