When we played Risk, we would limit the number of armies on any one territory to twelve. I think this is an official game variant. It limited the ‘ravening roving horde’ factor where a player puts all his armies on one territory, then goes on a rampage. Yeah, it made for longer games.
[QUOTE=BiblioCat]
Scrabble - the blank tiles. This came up a few weeks ago, and I don’t think we ever found the rulebook. When I was growing up, and playing with my family, we had a rule that if there was a blank on the board, you could take it and replace it if you had the correct tile letter that it was representing. This took the place of your turn, however.
Anyone else ever play with this rule?
[/QUOTE]
I always used the blank replacement rule when I played with my kids. I wasn’t allowed to, and they didn’t lose a turn for the swap, but it had to be their turn, so if you picked up the matching letter you had to wait until your turn came around again.
It was a way to try to even the game up a little, and give them opportunities to form longer words.
[QUOTE=bouv]
…And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone play by the “auction” rule in Monopoly. (For those that don’t know, the auction rule states that after a player lands on a property, but chooses not to buy it, it gets auctioned off till someone else buys it.)
[/QUOTE]
I’m wondering why anyone would ever choose not to buy a property they’ve landed on.
[QUOTE=Priceguy]
Banning the Prophetess in Talisman. Seriously, did anyone ever play her in playtesting?
[/QUOTE]
Are you referring to her spell-casting ability or the ability to look at the adventure cards or the combination? Is it sad that I remember her abilities after all these many years? If it’s the spell casting (ability to get a new spell after using one), my brother and his friends came up with a suitable house rule for this ability. They realized that, since most spells can be used at any time whatsoever, the only option is to continuously use them. So, to nerf this, I think they gave all spell-casters 2 to start, and then they could get one extra when they got a wand or book, but there was no auto-renewing of the spells. Made spell-casters much less of a powerhouse.
[QUOTE=garygnu]
I’m wondering why anyone would ever choose not to buy a property they’ve landed on.
[/QUOTE]
No money.
Speaking of which, does anyone actually play with the interest rule for unmortgaging property? The rent you lose from unmonopolified property is tiny compared to the expansion potential you gain from mortgaging property, so actually using the interest rule would prevent nonmonopolies from being just an extended bank account, but everyone I’ve played with whines about the math being too hard.
ETA: if you already have a monopoly and land on an unbought property, which rarely happens, you might pass it up in favor of saving up money to improve your monopoly.
[QUOTE=bordelond]
It’s not rent money to my experience – it’s Income and Luxury Taxes, and money paid due to Community Chest/Chance cards. Also, it was common for us to plop a $500 bill down in the middle of the board to “prime” Free Parking at the beginnings of games or whenever somebody just won the jackpot.
I’m not sure if **Least Original User Name Ever ** meant rent money went into the center or not 
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Everything but rent money. The game becomes “person with big, powerful monopolies” vs. “person that just landed on free parking and can put hotels on everything else”.
The American Dream in a nutshell, ladies and gents.
[QUOTE=garygnu]
In the early days of Magic: The Gathering, my friends and I played informal group games during school breaks and lunches. To speed things along, we could play all the lands in our hands on the first turn. Normally you can only play one land per turn. Nobody was skilled enough at the time to exploit it, though.
Re: Monopoly, doesn’t rent go to the property owner?
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, we used to do that with Magic as well. It’s good to plop 6 lands out and summon Very Big Monster on the first turn.
[QUOTE=Ludovic]
No money.
Speaking of which, does anyone actually play with the interest rule for unmortgaging property? The rent you lose from unmonopolified property is tiny compared to the expansion potential you gain from mortgaging property, so actually using the interest rule would prevent nonmonopolies from being just an extended bank account, but everyone I’ve played with whines about the math being too hard.
[/quote]
We play with interest, but my family likes Math 
More that you have one of the three properties, and someone else has another. No reason to buy then. If it is possible to get a monopoly,. then it is a different story, even if you have a monopoly already. Two monopolies are better than one.
On Monopoly, the Master has spoken:
What is supposed to happen when you land on “Free Parking” in Monopoly? (27-Jul-1984)
The article has many interesting rule variations, like this one:
Our family, like Bibliocat, played Scrabble with the rule that you could exchange a letter in your hand for a similar blank letter on the board (when my brother and I were younger.) We also had a rule that when it was your turn you could verify 1 (one) word in the dictionary.
[QUOTE=Ludovic]
Speaking of which, does anyone actually play with the interest rule for unmortgaging property? The rent you lose from unmonopolified property is tiny compared to the expansion potential you gain from mortgaging property, so actually using the interest rule would prevent nonmonopolies from being just an extended bank account, but everyone I’ve played with whines about the math being too hard.
[/QUOTE]
The math being too hard? It’s ten percent. Pretend there’s a decimal point at the end of the mortgage amount, move it over one space, round appropriately and add it on to the original mortgage price. What’s hard about that?
And you don’t really gain a TON of expansion potential…I guess if you mortgage Broadway for $200, and you have a monopoly on the light blues, it’s worth four houses, but the light blue monopolies aren’t worth squat anyway. If you’re developing the oranges, for $100 per house, Broadway’s the only property that will get you more than one house in one go, and half of the properties won’t get you any by themselves. The value in non-grouped properties is in bargaining with other players to GET grouped properties.
A four-player monopoly game played at a brisk pace can easily be finished in an hour. Several friends from highschool and I would get together once or twice a month and play two or three games in a night. The trick is, you actually have to gasp play by the rules – no free parking money, no extra for landing ON go, improvements must be made evenly, you can only sell houses to the bank at half-price, you can’t transfer improved properties, there is a limited number of houses and hotels (this and the no free parking money are the two big things that make the game go faster), related to the limited houses and hotels: you can only build hotels if there are enough houses to build four on each property first (i.e. you can’t jump straight from no houses to hotels if there are fewer than 12 (or 8 for the purple and blue properties) EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY), and finally, yes, mortgage interest rate intact (AND the mortgage interest rate on transferred properties intact – if you receive another player’s mortgaged properties, you must pay 10% interest on the mortgage price immediately upon receiving them. You can then choose to pay just the mortgage price to unmortgage them, but if you don’t unmortgage them right away, you have to pay the 10% again when you do).
Whew. It sounds boring, but it isn’t. The fun in Monopoly isn’t “make loads and loads of money!” it’s “figure out the best investment you can afford to make, then figure out how you can make it happen.” A good life lesson, actually.
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
On Monopoly, the Master has spoken:
What is supposed to happen when you land on “Free Parking” in Monopoly? (27-Jul-1984)
[/QUOTE]
Thanks; I forgot about this article. It’s about time somebody linked to it.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Our nuclear rule for Risk was that you could use a card at the start of your turn. It would wipe out all armies except one in the territory on the card (and no fallout). The payback was that any player who had a nuclear card used against him could retaliate by launching a nuclear card of his own (and it didn’t have to be against the player who attacked him). And the victim of that card could retaliate in turn and so on. Nuclear wars tended to go on until people had run out of useful cards and would wipe out a lot of armies. But if you managed to stay out of a nuclear war, you’d usually be the most powerful player on the board afterwards.
[/QUOTE]
Our nuclear addition was that when turning in a RISK, if one of the three cards was either one of the two wild cards, you could nuke one of the territories in that RISK. That way, there were only two bombs in any “single deck” game and you were limited to the possibilities in your hand. You could hang on to it till something good came up of course. Once nuked, you placed one of your men from the RISK in to hold the territory, not being allowed to move all the RISK into it on that turn. It was great for breaking a country and/or, if lucky, hitting a border country with many troops.
In Kingmaker, we used to play that if you drew the “Chancellor May Summon Parliament”, you could only keep it if you held the Chancellor. That was because there were only a couple of that card, which was meant to break deadlocks when there was no king available to call Parliament. Allowing a player without the Chancellor to hoard that card sort of defeated the purpose.
We also reversed the rule about roads. The official rules say you can only move on the roads when you control the castles. We changed it to you could go anywhere on the roads, unless you were blocked by someone else’s castle.
Both of these rules were meant to increase the speed of the game and prevent stalemates. As well, the rule about castles increased the diplomacy quotient, since a minor player who happened to control a major road had increased bargaining power.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
When I used to play scrabble with some old roomates back in the day, we would score double points for band names.
[/QUOTE]
This is an awesome rule.
I’m guessing you never put down Kajagoogoo.
This thread is making me want to play monopoly.
Is there a freeware monopoly-type game available anywheres?
-frL-
Nobody would ever let me play Diplomacy with the “re-buy” option. 
[QUOTE=garygnu]
In the early days of Magic: The Gathering, my friends and I played informal group games during school breaks and lunches. To speed things along, we could play all the lands in our hands on the first turn. Normally you can only play one land per turn. Nobody was skilled enough at the time to exploit it, though.
[/QUOTE]
Yum–house-rules Magic! Among the most common house rules my Magic pals and I used are the following:
-We use “judgement mulligans.” You can mulligan as many times as you want without a card penalty as long as you can come up with a decent reason for it. I remember one game where I mulliganed because my opening hand was so incredibly cheap that I didn’t want to use it because it’d be too easy to win with.
-You can change which lands you tap during your opponent’s turn, so long as you ask nicely. This isn’t all that much of a help, as it almost always alerts your opponent that you’ve got SOMETHING up your sleeve.
-You can look at your opening hand before you decide whether or not you want to go first.
-In team games, you can attack with your partner’s creatures if you ask them.
For a long time, my family played Trivial Pursuit in “speed” version: If you answered any question correctly, you got a color piece, regardless if you were on a square or not. We got a DVD version of Trivial Pursuit recently that put a stop to this, because the pie questions are all on the DVD, but this only caused us to alter the rule slightly. Now, if everyone’s getting tired, the person with the most pieces gets to go to the center automatically.
This thread makes me want to ask, has anybody ever played Killer Bunnies here? That game actively encourages you to make house rules. 
You all make Apples to Apples sound like great fun… I’ve never gotten to play it, though it sounds so very excellent.
[QUOTE=garygnu]
Nobody would ever let me play Diplomacy with the “re-buy” option. 
[/QUOTE]
Not while you still border me you aren’t!
[QUOTE=JustAnotherGeek]
Are you referring to her spell-casting ability or the ability to look at the adventure cards or the combination?
[/QUOTE]
Each ability on its own is amazing. The combination makes her unbeatable. The adventure card ability means that whoever is sitting after her is continually shafted. “Oh look, a bag of gold. Enjoy your dragon!”
As for the autorenewing of spells, we use (yes, we still play) the “Arcane Laboratory” rule: one spell per turn. The Prophetess is still banned, though.
Probably no one else here has heard of it, but a few decades ago, we had a board game called “Titanic.” (This was well before the Leo DeCaprio movie.) Rolls of the dice and cards drawn caused the ship to gradually sink. Meanwhile, based on dice and cards, players could run around it gathering passengers, food and water into lifeboats. When the ship sank, a rescue ship appeared and players attempted to be first to reach it with a specified minimum of survivors.
We modified it to add permitted interception of other lifeboats to steal supplies, toss opponents’ passengers overboard, etc. We also added sharks. Illogical in iceberg-filled water, but what the heck. We’re weird.
My kids used to love that game. When the L DeC movie came out, the younger was amazed that they had made a movie out of a board game, and had to be told it was based on an actual event.