The Importance of House Rules to Ensure FUN!

In which I create the neologism fun-jective.

I just came off a three day weekend and that means that I got to spend a little time playing games with my twin daughters History and Mystery. We’ve been playing gams since they were very little and lately we’ve been playing a lot of Heroquest. I own the Mythic Tier copy from Hasbro’s HasLab crowdfunding program and we are playing through the entire campaign using some of the alternate characters like the Bard.

It’s a great time and a fine way to pass the time between the once a month D&D campaign sessions I get to run for them and their friends. Who am I kidding, we all know what makes Heroquest so great.

As often happens when I play games with them, I get nostalgic for the times I played with them when they were younger. We’ve played a lot of games over the years, but I always wish I could have played “just one more game” with them. I mourn for days yet to come when they won’t be in the house to play games with any more. I shift from nostalgic to pre-nostalgic. It’s a quintessentially Gen X response that has been highlighted in films like Vision Quest and Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Farrell one), where the characters realize that they are too nostalgic and that it affects their ability to be in the moment.

While many focus on Gen X as a “cynical” or “couldn’t give two shits” generation, I’ve never found that to be the case. I find us to be a very nostalgic and pre-nostalgic generation. Whether it’s our love for the pop culture of prior generations (you’ll find few bigger fans of Hammer films, Flash Gordon, or Robert E. Howard than those in Gen X) or whether it’s songs like Bowling for Soup’s Getting Old Sucks, I find there’s a reflexive nostalgia to Gen X that is often overlooked. This nostalgia got me thinking about some of the games I used to play with my daughters when they were very young and how playing those games influenced how I think about play in general.

Even when the kids were very young played a wide variety of games ranging from Candyland to Fantasy Flight Games' Rattlesnake. As they got older, we expanded play to include a little role playing as Ponies who understood that Friendship is Magic! I still hold that Alessio Cavatore’s game design on Tails of Equestria is the best he’s done, and that’s including the awesome work he did on Mordheim. When we play these games, we aren’t doing it merely for the sake of occupying time, but also to create a sense of enjoyment among the participants. In short, we were playing these games to have fun.

But how does one go about designing a "fun" game? One of the reasons there are so many kinds of games (wargames, conflict games, area control games, cooperative games, track games) is because the goals of gamers with regard to what is fun aren't always the same. Not only are they different among different people, but they are different for the same individual at different times. For example, there are times when I want to play a little Battletech just to get out some aggression through robot vs robot conflict, but there are other times when I want to journey through Mirkwood with the help of my friend Jason in a cooperative fashion while playing Fantasy Flight's Lord of the Rings Living Card Game. And those are just two of my moods.

Over the years of playing games with History and Mystery, I’ve discovered that sometimes the game's rules aren't the most fun way to use the game's components. Let me just say that History and Mystery never cease to amaze me with regard to how they look at the world. I remember one time when the girls were very young, I was watching the show Burn Notice while they were coloring. History looked up and saw the skyscraper condos overlooking the water and we had the following conversation:

HISTORY: That's pretty. Where is that daddy?

ME: That, oh, that's Miami.

HISTORY: Why is it YOUR ami?

ME: (Laughing) No...it's not My ami, it's not Your ami, it's Miami.

MYSTERY: It's not Your ami, or History's ami, but is it My ami?

I laughed for hours at the way their minds worked on that one. It still makes me laugh to this day. I understood what they were getting at, and why they would mistake "Miami" for "My ami," but the way they are processing the information is hilarious. I do think I was finally able to convey that it was just the name of the city.

At least I think so.

And thinking of that memory brings to mind the way they interpreted what a dog’s bark sounded like before they learned the word “bark.” They would say that dog’s said, “Nawn! Nawn! Nawn!” It was the cutest thing ever, but it vanished forever the first time someone corrected them and said, “No, dog’s bark.” I hated losing the “Nawn! Nawn! Nawn!” and have retained it all these years because of the joy of hearing their interpretation.

The point is that History and Mystery sometimes look at things differently than I do, and when this is combined with what they constitute as fun it leads to some enjoyable house rules.

Let's take the game Rattlesnake as an example. It's a simple game that comes with 12 very strong magnets that the players are trying to get rid of, and the first to do so wins the game. The players roll a die and it tells them what color snake they have to set their egg upon. If that egg disturbs another egg and they collide, then you have to pick up all the eggs that collided and have failed to get rid of any. The magnets are very strong and the board is small, so this game can get pretty zany. The key here is that the first player to LOSE all their eggs is the winner.

As written, I have always liked the game, but and History and Mystery hated it. You see losing all your magnets wasn’t fun for them. What WAS fun for them was making the magnets collide and picking them up. For them, the loser was the first one to lose all of their eggs. They found it fun to acquire the eggs rather than to lose them.

This collision is the fun that is inherent in the components. The eggs have strong magnets that attract them to one another and they collide with a loud "clack!" That's great fun. That's great component fun, and it has nothing to do with the rules. With regard to what my daughters find fun, the rules as written have an objective diametrically opposed to their fun goal.

And this is where one sees the real importance of House Rules. When I was younger, I made house rules to fix "what was wrong" with a game or to do a particular thing "better." This led to the creation of a number of spell point systems, and no fewer than 5 versions of Superspeed for the DC Heroes role playing game. At the time, I thought I was fixing the game objectively. What I didn't understand, was that I was tweaking the rules to fit my fun-jective.

Having feeble Wizards, regardless of how they matched up with other characters at high levels, was annoying to me as a fun-jective. I wanted to play Gandalf or Merlin, I didn't want to be the apprentice in Dragonslayer. That just didn't seem fun to me, and the rules disagreed with that fun. I liked the components of D&D. I have a fondness for the odd dice, the miniatures, and the rolling of 5 or 6 dice when casting fireball. I find that these are all fun activities. Heck, one of the reasons I love Champions is the opportunity to roll handfuls of dice. That's just a good time. My fun goal and the fun goal of the game weren't lined up, even though the fun inherent in using the components was the same.

Eventually, I learned to have a flexible definition of fun and to allow individual games to set the "magic circle" of what fun is being attempted. In doing so, I've come to appreciate design efforts I might otherwise have overlooked. Setting aside my personal fun-jectives from time to time leads to enjoyable experiences. Heck, my journey as a game master in roleplaying games has gone from grudging acceptance to joy as I came to view the GM "fun" rule to be "Losing the game in a dramatic way is the job of the Game Master." If you are losing properly, then the players are having fun. The key here is "in a dramatic way." There needs to be risk for the players, and character death must be an option. But it's like a TV show, in that you know the protagonists will usually win out...not always, but usually... and they'll rarely die. It depends on the game and the expectations, but players rarely enjoy investing time in creating a persona only to have it die as the GM laughs at how pathetic they are. Though that can be fun from time to time too.

Playing games with History and Mystery over the years has reminded me how important it is to sometimes forget what the fun being attempted by a game is, and to see what kind of fun the components of the game are advocating. In the case of Rattlesnake, the components make the clashing and acquiring of eggs fun even as playing this way makes the game a player elimination game. The complexities it adds to magnet placement are interesting though when playing to acquire, rather than lose, eggs. Instead of playing with the tension of Jenga, it plays with a tension closer to that of Pool. You want to place any new eggs in a way that collides with as many other eggs as possible, but in relatively remote places when you are in a low egg environment.

I still think the original use of the rules is better, and so do my daughters now that they are older, but over the years I’ve come to understand that sometimes the fun promised by game components and that provided by game play are different and that the fun-jectives that a player might have vary with age and experience.

It was a nice refresher course for me, and it reminded that I really need to get around to sharing some of my house rules for Candyland with all of you. As I’ve said many times, Candyland is a game design course in a box and the reason for that it is has rules with one fun-jective and components that can support many.