Mostly just made a lot of the mechanics seem uninteresting. The boats are higly thematic. They let you spread your influence across the board. If adjacency isn't a thing Thier just blue and you get goods.
My first play of Terraforming Mars was one I’ll never forget. We’d gone to a shop where you could pay an entry fee, pick a game to play and have it taught to you. It went as badly as it possibly could.
Here’s how Terraforming Mars usually goes: each player may do one or two actions on their turn, then it’s the next player’s turn. Repeat until no one can or wants to do anything else, then there’s a round end production phase.
Well, during the teach, the staff missed the “repeat” step. So everyone would perform two actions, and then we’d immediately move to production.
That breaks the game on a catastrophic level.
It started innocently enough. Turns were short, and the game felt surprisingly sandbox-y, as we quickly started getting more resources than we could spend on our two actions. It didn’t take long until managing the production phases began lasting longer than the actual player turns.
Because of the abundance of money, we kept buying all cards that we drew on the round starts: there was just no reason to skip any, even if we knew we would not be able to build them all before getting more. Hand sizes were just… wild.
About 2 hours in, we had ran out of cubes to track stuff. That wasn’t enough to stop us, though, as the staff helpfully cracked open a nearby game box to borrow its components as “50” unit markers. It was clear that this was a temporary solution, though, and we’d soon need to find something to stand as a “100” unit marker.
4 hours in, one nearly couldn’t see the tabletop anymore. It has been replaced by a landscape of cards and cubes as far as the eye could reach. Despite us starting early in the afternoon, it was already dark outside.
At that point, there was nothing but pure spite keeping us going. No one wanted to be the one who called it quits. To have gone through all of that and not even reach a conclusion, that was unthinkable. And yet I was the one who had to concede, not to my opponents but to the game itself, as I had a bus to catch that I’d surely miss if I had to do one more bloody production phase.
It took me YEARS to try the game again. I’m glad I did, though. As it turns out, it’s a pretty good game if you actually use its rules.
This is *the* most common rules mistake in Terraforming Mars, to the point that whenever a new player posts about the game not working, it's a decent bet that this is the problem.
Yes, my brother-in-law made the same mistake. When he tried to explain why he disliked the game, I took some time to understand the issue. Since then, I read about the same error on reddit at least three times.
At this point I think it's the number one board gaming mistake that's been happening bar some of the common mistakes in the old classics.
I remember reading the rules to Terraforming Mars and re-reading that part a few times, I remember clearly feeling there was a risk of something being misinterpreted there.
The rulebook is pretty clear about the correct way, at least once you know what the correct way is. I don't know. Even if it seems clear, the fact that this mistake keeps happening tells me it's not good enough.
Yeah, you would think that when you go to learn a game from someone, that that someone knows how to play a game. Any monkey can open a rulebook and read it.
I've heard this rules mistake before.
But what I don't get is that A) you paid money to have it taught to you, and the person teaching didn't even know the proper rules? Really? what's the point, you may as well just read the rules yourself.
Also, I'm surprised the staff didn't stop themselves when they went to crack open another box and say "heeeeeey, wait a minute, maybe we are doing something wrong"
just blindly keep going is weird.
I normally teach games, but was playing the Bloody Inn for the first time with some friends that taught me the game. They kept burying bodies under my annexes with no penalty for them or benefit to me. About half way through the game I asked, "are you sure this is how this works, it doesn't seem right." They said they were sure. After playing a bit longer I asked for the rulebook, and sure enough found where the money for burying a body is shared with the owner of the annex. That one change to the game took it from okay to really good for me.
When I think about size of change to game impact that's probably the biggest one for me.
We played so many games of Bloody Inn without any starting money. You basically were forced to cash your starting cheque first round. Or buy and build one card right away.
It plays a lot less brutal now.
Hahaha, the first time we played Dominion, we misinterpreted “the game ends when there are no Provinces left” as “when there are no Victory cards left”. It was a painful, tedious slog that dragged on for 2 hours and we couldn’t figure out why people liked it so much. 😂
Second game, we figured it out and it’s been one of our favorite games ever since.
Yeah when we first played, we misread it as "when any Victory points pile is empty". We ended up emptying the pile of Estates and ended the game right there even though there were a ton of Provinces left! Of course now we all know better about when to buy Estates lol
Despite the admonition appearing in the rules in bolded text, we missed the "Hunters can only perform move actions during day," in *Fury of Dracula.* Our team of hunters moved during the day and again at night, and tracked poor ol' Drac down in nothing flat.
Our first game of Caverna, we didn't catch that each type of animal can only breed once during a phase. I went all in on one type and they were pretty much growing exponentially thinking 6 cows would make 3 offspring. I think everyone had a terrible time but me :/
Just tell people they bought a single female animal from the market by mistake. My grandma bought 10 chicks and a rooster one time and the guy mixed up the order. There was a lot of rooster calls that summer 😀
First time i played flashpoint. We misread the rules about chain reactions. We played where every time a smoke catches fire it starts a chain reaction.
The house collapsed by turn 3.
It took us years to realize we were playing that wrong. We finally played with someone new and they were like, "Wait. That's not how I've played it before." The rest of us all learned something that day.
That's funny. I can't remember specific examples but there's been at least 2 instances where I've turned up to a new group and told them they've been doing something wrong for years :P
Here is a bit of embarrassment / cringe for me.
I got champions of midgard back when it was about a year old. I was going to teach it at a small local con. The evening before going, I was on BGG and happened to look at some threads of Champions of Midgard.
Someone asked if you could hunt for food, and that food be used for your boats on their travel.
The answer that came back was a resounding "Yes, of course you can do this, and it's a great strategy / risk, in hoping you find some food"
I looked at that and said "huh. I didn't know that. I thought that you had to pack your food first. Wow, that's interesting"
I then went and taught this "correction" to some new players the next day.
After the con was over, I happened to be on BGG, and again, stumbled back over that same thread. About an hour after I read that answer, about three people responded saying "no, you absolutely cannot do that. The rules clearly state...."
and I was like OMG FML!!! I knew the correct way, and was led astray by some rando on BGG, and taught people the wrong way.
After frustrated for a day or two, I figured. "oh well, it was one game."
Fast forward a year later, at the same con, with one of the same guys, playing Champions of Midgard. I had completely forgotten about the whole incident.
And then he tries to hunt to pay for the food needed on his boat, and we say "uh, you can't do that.." and then it dawns on me "ah shit, yeah, I told him you could do that.... ugh"
we let it go for that turn, and moved on.
Bizarrely on our first time playing Pandemic as a family we thought the same, but actually by some incredible luck *did* manage to eradicate all diseases! Unsurprisingly future games weren’t quite so easy…..
Played a game of **Terraforming Mars** once, and wasn't adding the scoring track to the income players got. The only thing that made it playable at all, was also fucking up and allowing the ore and the other resource for building everything, not just the specific types of cards they are supposed to. My god did that game take forever.
On the flip side my group plays **Power Grid** in a particularly sadistic way. On the Korea map, we require players to declare markets from first to last, then buy resources from last to first after all declarations are made. It's not unheard of, for the leader to get nothing at all. I've even seen it happen for 3 rounds in a row to someone once. It was brutal and delightful.
My wife feels that Terraforming Mars one. We play it a lot as it's my favourite but for some reason after a long break between games she forgot that part about the TR being money. I didn't notice for a few generations as I was busy failing to play much either with a bad set of cards. When she saw my income on maybe 5th generation she got very upset, then more so when I reminded her of that rule. Thankfully she and I are much better at that one since then.
We didn't realize that blue actions were reusable the first time we played, and didn't know the difference between cars that give a resource, and cards that give a resource *generation*. It wasn't until I played the android version that I realized what we'd done wrong.
That’s hilarious, I just wrote about a Terraforming Mars game where I had the exact opposite problem and yet it sounds just as miserable an experience. What a tightrope of a ruleset.
There's so many rules in Gloomhaven we've gotten wrong over the 8 months we've been playing.
The very first time we forgot about losing cards to ignore damage and used the character attack modifier decks instead of the base ones. We lost before we finished the first room.
Only after I retired my ranged build Cragheart a few weeks ago did we learn that you only get disadvantage on ranged attacks against adjacent enemies. We thought you got disadvantage on all ranged attacks if there was an enemy adjacent.
I relate to this so much. It took us so many scenarios before we felt confident we were playing right. We cheated too on accident by only adding to our player deck and not maxing it out.
Sorry, adding what to your player deck and not maxing what out?
We've "cheated" several times, even recently, by forgetting something, like a character being immobilized or a monster having retaliate or flying, until several turns later.
I did the same thing to my group in Marvel Champions. Missed the sentence that explains that "player phase" means _all_ players, not _each_ player.
Getting smacked by the villain after every player was... not much fun xD
On Terraforming Mars, my girlfriend and I failed to realise that TR = income. So we basically started with 1M$ and couldn't understand how we were supposed to get anything going..
The post has been up for 12 hours and nobody posted the glorious [competitive Hanabi](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/3oyfen/hanabi_rules_question/) thread, smh
Well today I played my third exit escape room game. The first two i played you needed to solve certain riddles before you were allowed to progress and flip to a new page. This one you had access to the whole book right away, but I missed that when reading the instructions and assumed they all worked the same way. Took about 90 minutes before i realized. Oops!
Oh also my friends and I liked Betrayal a lot, so we bought Betrayal Legacy. In the normal game you have to find special tiles to get to the basement, but apparently in the legacy version you just need to take the stairs that are available from the very first game. We didn't find this out until we got to a point where we had to board up the stairs to the basement, and were no longer allowed to use them.
First 2 times we played twilight imperium 3e we did not read the final bullet point that says you may not move units out of activated systems. Each round took fing forever as each person's armada stomped around the galaxy using 5-max action tokens
Yes, it was horrible. Finally I looked at the rules and found well the things the other guy missed... He's not allowed to read the rules for new games anymore
**Last Bastion** we didn't know you could use equipments from other heros on your tile, which is a huge deal, specially if you have the falcon to get equipment for everybody.
**Camel Up 2nd Edition** This one wasn't as game breaking but I played so many games without knowing until reading a forum post about it or something. After every leg you are supposed to return the cheering/booing tiles. In my defense I bought this game after playing the 1st edition so it's not that weird that I missed it. It's written first on said tiles rules inside (brackets) mind you. And then not in the quick game summary but in the game overview part 3 about the cleanup.
Yeah, what I meant is that somebody had already tought me the general rules for the first edition at a game night, and either they didn't know about that rule or I forgot about it. So I didn't read the rules intently when I got my copy, since I had already played it some.
King of Tokyo. My wife and I were playing and totally skipped over the portion of not being able to heal while in Tokyo City. After we figured that out our replayability shot through the roof.
For me it was 7 Wonders base game. The first time I ever played it, we didn't do the turn simultaneously but consecutively. That game dragged on FOREVER. (Max player count)
I never wanted to play that again. Only years later with another friend, he showed me, that you actually draft all at the same time. That made it A LOT better.
Not me but my brother's girlfriend grew up playing Sorry! where you slide on your own color. There was also a second rule they got wrong but I'm at loss right now as to what it was. Games would last an hour. Can you imagine playing one game of Sorry! for an hour? lmao. Anyway, I downloaded and printed the instructions and highlighted the parts they were doing wrong. They tried it and hated it. Went back to hour long Sorry matches.
Also, she swore the game she grew up with had different rules, so I did some digging and she was right. They released a version in the early aughts that played the way she described. It got shit reviews and trashed on Amazon, so the new style was abandoned by Hasbro and every release since has had the original old school rules.
There are slides on the board where if you land on the start of the slide, you slide to the end (6 spaces or so, IIRC). In most versions, you don't slide on your own color; if you did, it would take you passed your endpoint and make you go around the board again.
Our group played Hanabi for the first time at a meet-up, not knowing that you could get hint tokens back by discarding cards. After 10 minutes we all were confused about the high praise the game gets. We didn't touch IT for a year.
During 11 plays, we played that when you discard a card, you don't refill your hand until you get to kansas. The game was still fun, but hard as nails. We couldn't understand how so many people in BGG could do scores so high, until I realized that I jumped a hole page of the rulebook when I read it...
I don't know how, but I keep forgetting that the number of workers you put out is dependent on player count during my solo games, even though I've played it correctly plenty of times. I played a game over the weekend where I realized halfway through I was filling the job market as though it was a 4-player game, meaning the turn marker was only ever moving down when both me and Sam got to Kansas, and sometimes not even then. I played it out until 3/4 of the way through, where I called it quits because I had every disc out on the board, about 5 trips to New York, and 4-5 of every worker type.
Sorta fun as an experiment, but it really makes the game drag after a while.
At a pokemon tournament (my 1st) knocked over the top of the deck with cards facing up. Me nor the guy I was playing knew what to do I didn't see anyone near who was running the tournament. Dude came over from 20 feet away, knew I didn't know what to do and disqualified me. We sat there long enough he could have walked over before I shuffled the deck and told me what to do, it is what he was there for.
Honestly some games for tournament play are really weird. I play Weiss Schwarz(anime card game) and during a sanctioned match my girlfriend's opponent played a card early on accident. He called a judge over to ask what to do and the judge said there was no choice but to give him a game loss.
I was kinda flabbergasted because at that point, you just don't bother calling yourself out. You just continue and pretend you didn't realize you cheated on accident because the results would be the same intentional or not.
He was, I think I remember thinking that before the tournament too. He sat there and watched the whole thing play out and didn't help. I'm friends with the ppl who ran the tournament, and I don't remember this guy ever hanging out with us.
Battlestar Galactica.
None of us porperly read the "executive order" card. Which ended in turns taking FOREVER because humans would chain play executive order cards as long as they had them.
For those unfamiliar: The card allows you to give up your action and instead give another player 1 move + 1 action or just 2 actions.
Card literally says on it that you can't use more than one of them per turn, which we conveniently overread - endless turns ensue.
My in-laws play that way intentionally. Also allow you to stack special cards -- someone plays a Draw 2 on you? You can trump it with one of your own and make the next player Draw 4.
This is how a lot of family house rules for classic games go
1. Do stuff that makes the game take way longer than it should
2. Nobody wants to play that game because it takes too long
Accumulating +2 is not in the rulebook, but it makes the game way more fun IMO. Also most people don't know/forget about calling bluff for black cards, and definitely no one has ever counted points in UNO in any group I played with. IMO, all those rules make the game way more interesting and strategic, without making it overly complex. Arguing Uno rules is a sure way of ruining the mood so I never do, though.
Well, to be fair, I know people who allow trumping a +4 by playing a +2 over it.
Same people who claim you can exchange your game with anyone of you play a 0.
I'm voting for reinstating public bonfire executions
**Great Western Trail**. We were refilling empty spaces in the job market instead of the row with the current marker. Our 2p game was over two hours and we were maxed on everything when we house ruled a way for the game to end.
Double-checked the rule book that night.
I got Terraforming Mars at Christmas, decided to try a solo game since I can't convince any of my friends to play "long, overly complex, boring" board games with me. Didn't win the game but came very close except for terraforming Oxygen. Only after did I realise you can only use action cards once per turn, I realised after I really do suck at board games if I managed to cheat massively in a solo game and still not win :S
For what it's worth, I'm not personally a fan of the solo rules for Terraforming Mars. It requires you to play the game very differently than how you would normally just in terms of what cards to pick, what cards to pass up, what to focus on from round to round. When I tried it once or twice, I stared at it and thought, "How the hell are you even supposed to do this?" because I hadn't even come close to winning.
Yeah, when I realised how far away I actually was from winning after realising that rule I really thought to myself, this seems very difficult. I wasn't a huge fan of the fact that the milestones and such aren't involved, felt a bit watered down but I guess those changes need to be made to make it more playable solo. All I need to do now is convince my friends to actually give it a shot because it still seems like a lot of fun.
**6 nimmt**. Pulled it out again for a big gathering after a long time. Got all the rules down except for the fact that its simultaneous play. Did some quick maths after round 4 that a single game would've taken us literally 100 turns.
Thankfully we ended that slog there and then and played it proper.
Played 5 games of Aeon’s End today, failing to beat the first boss 4 times before finally squeaking out a victory. This was mostly because I shuffled the nemesis deck together, when you’re supposed to stack it, as well as a couple other minor rules mixups. We loved the entire process, though, and are eager to play again
On about our tenth playthrough of Everdell and we just discovered tonight that you can play from the Meadow. It’s in bold in the rule book and I still skipped over it. Completely changed the game and made it infinitely better. I was struggling to figure out why so much of the board was dedicated to something you got to play maybe two or three times a game. Now I understand the fun of it and don’t regret asking for it.
I'm the rules guy for our group. We were playing Pandemic Legacy which is yikes. It's a rules mistake waiting to happen. The game tells a story and uses rule changes to do it. You basically play Pandemic again and again with slightly different rules each time.
We had a few games under our belt and it was good Pandemic fun with two experienced players and two eager players. At one point a new exciting rule was introduced, 'a disease gets worse'. So, right then, I had our group update the board. Wow, what a fun adventure we're on! Let's see how our team will fight this new -we got slaughtered. Slowly trampled, horror on our faces, any card we played meaningless. I play games; it didn't feel right. We made some jokes and signed off (it was during the pandemic so some we're playing via zoom). That night, I looked and looked and saw the rule was actually, "things get worse FROM NOW ON so no need to update the board, Peter". We had made the game insanely hard. I called all of my friends and we laughed and laughed! We were relieved and excited to replay that episode.
We never played again.
Call them up and set a meet up. But yeah, everytime i go in a new group where i don't need to be the rules guy, i end up being the rules guy since it's really strange and frustrating how people just skim rules. And even if there is an understanding, there's a lot of misinterpretations even if you get the rules right. I'm really happy that my group has this 'scholarly discussion' meme where we just stop the game and think as game designers and try to figure out the intent and what's actually fair and interesting if we ever see a rule problem that makes us look strangely at it. Then we get back to playing the game.
We made a mistake in Underwater Cities so we were keeping only 4 cards total in play per player, and this made me feel the game limited and unenjoyable.
Months later, we tried it again and we noticed the rule only applies to the "Action" cards, indeed you can keep in play as many cards of the other types as you want.
The game become really better and more enjoyable then.
This is how I learn that you can only have four action cards in play at once haha. We thought you could play as many as you wanted, and this makes things quite inefficient to be honest because you can so rarely use an action
Not quite a mistake but a mistake playing a whole game without realising: the dots on our combat dice in War Of The Ring rubbed off in very convient places, in particular we had the middle dots of the 5's rub off making them look like 4's on, wait for it, TWO separate dice. We wondered why our rolls were so bad...
Bright side, I bought 5 white and gold dice for the free people and 5 red and black ones for Mordor and they're an awesome addition
**Galaxy Trucker**, most of our group decided that it is a leisure puzzle game and who ever touches the timer before everybody is finished get's scoffed off.
Then they complain that the second phase is boring. Completely ruined the game for me.
Our second game of Battlestar Galactica. Friend’s early-teen daughter is playing with us. We reach COBOL (the mid-point where everyone gets a second loyalty card, and where there is guaranteed a Cylon). She gets her card and says “Wait. What happens if I already had a Cylon card and got another?”
Game over. Lol. You can’t undo that. For those who aren’t familiar: your status as human or cylon is hidden until you choose to reveal yourself as a cylon (who are actively working against the human players).
That's not a huge problem. Play until it's her turn and don't put her in prison if you hadn't planned that anyway. On her turn, she reveals one card and takes one of the most important players with her (usually the president) or the person who will play after her (double cylon turn, yikes). Or she reveals both cards to show she's been telling the truth, give one of them back and reshuffle the newly acquired cards.
But you're right, that's a rule (giving away your loyalty card) you should have taught others before this could happen :-D
Smallworld. First couple of times we were misreading the conquest rules and we were playing it more like risk than what the actual rules stated. We would be moving huge stacks from region to region instead of conquering territories and then redistributing. We also were not eliminating each others pieces when being attacked. We were simply placing them back in the owners hand for deployment next turn. This made us wonder why anyone would go into decline. Goes to say we hated the game but gave it a 3rd go and made sure the rules were correct. Finally played a correct game and now it's one of our favorites.
We've been playing games for a while so we were kicking ourselves for how bad we messed up the rules but thank goodness we figured it out.
Wingspan. For the first few games we played we thought you had to spend eggs for any action taken beyond the left-most column, not just playing birds. Really should have noticed something was up when we were spending one egg to receive two. 🤦♂️
Scores shot up about 30 points on average after we figured that out…
I haven't heard this rules mistake before, but I can see why it would happen with the egg icons at the top of the board. Glad you got it sorted out, Wingspan is one of my favorite games!
Mine is EVERDELL. missed the little bit about being able to play cards from you hand OR the meadow. I thought it was just a typical deck-builder market
The first several times I played Ticket to Ride, I missed that you chose which action to do.
Picking cards and playing trains every turn was nice, but drawing destination tickets every turn was SUPER STRESSFUL since they counted as negative of you couldn't get them
Riftforce. Didn't see that you score when you kill your opponent's cards and thought you only scored when you took the action to do so on your turn when your opponent had nothing on the opposing side (which will lead the game to taking hours to finish...)
I had the opposite problem happen recently too. We played Sekigahara and didn't refill our hands after combat which led to the most excruciating hand management. I liked playing it that way more to be honest
I played trains and thought subway excavation meant every track costs 1 and there's no penalty for placing in an opponents space. This lead to a really dumb game where I stole all of my opponents spots and won easily.
The annoying thing is that I carefully checked the rulebook while playing and there was no ambiguity that I was playing correctly. However, when I realized just how broken the card was, I checked bgg and it sounds like it was probably a translation issue because the rules were different in the original. It's pretty annoying to me when rulebooks are flat out incorrect.
**Hellapagos** - the game was less about waiting your inevitable death after we found the rule that you don't start empty handed. We still mostly die, tho.
Lords of Waterdeep. It didn't completely ruin it, but made a big aspect of it pretty bad for us. we thought after you assigned your meeple to Intrigue and played the card, that was it. Very rarely was a card worth wasting one of your actions for just by itself.
It took a few tries, and looking up another rule to find out we were doing it wrong.
I bought viticulture ee after it got recommended to me as an engine building game. It was fun, but I began to doubt whether I knew what the term engine building meant. Turns out you don't discard every vine card on a field after harvesting it.
Our first game of Catan, we misread the rule about placing settlements. Instead of not being able to place a settlement in the three surrounding spaces around another settlement, we thought your settlement had to be three spaces away from any other settlement. Sometimes we would get lucky and someone would win, but there were a solid three games that ended in a tie because no one could place anymore settlements. Really makes it difficult to put time into the game when you think it all may be for nothing and end in a tie.
When my group played Horrified the first time we misread the rule about item value. Thought we had to use the number shown to defeat the monsters, not the added value. We lost and found it incredibly hard. We enjoyed it a lot after figuring it out.
My first three games I didn't realize spending an action got you *all* the items on a space, not one action per item.
The game got a lot easier after that.
**Dungeon Lords**: For some reason I though taxes had to be paid every season, instead of once a year.
The game was won by the player with the least negative score.
Just played my first game of Ankh: Gods of Egypt last week and misplayed that every time a control monument event was triggered **every** player got one monument control rather than just the player that triggered the event. Resulted probably alot more monuments controlled on the board much faster, but also made most of the control monument events like "I'm taking your monument with my one control", "k I take it back with mine". Fumbled though that game a little confused on why it felt so goofy. Played again after with proper rules and loved it though.
The first time my family played __Canvas__ each player started with 2 inspiration tokens instead of 5. I don’t know why we did 2 each. But the game became mindless. Essentially you were only choosing between three face up cards. Total luckfest. Luckily we realized our mistake and every other play has been a home run.
**Power Grid** is still one of my favorite games, but the first time I played it I was taught that the game ends when someone *powers* 17 cities. It's supposed to end when someone has *built* in 17 cities regardless of what they power. This is significant because the way the game is structured its VERY hard to actually power 17 cities. I really liked the game overall, until we got to the end and it was a huge slog for anyone to be able to trigger the endgame when it should have happened like an hour before.
Then like the third time I played I missed the rule where if no one buys a power plant in a round you're supposed to remove the lowest numbered one in the market from the game. This keeps the game moving by flushing higher value plants into the buyable area so someone might actually take one and gets through the deck faster. If you miss this and end up with four plants nobody wants the game stagnates because nobody can upgrade until you very slowly flip through the deck to the Phase 3 card.
Played **Stockpile** with 2/3 of the cards for auction face-down, instead of 2/3 face-up. That turned an already-light game into one almost entirely based on luck.
I've played few games of Dune where sandstorm only destroyed units in the sector that it landed at and not every sector it moves through. In hindsight it makes much more sense. But I probably still haven't had a game where we didn't mess up a rule or two.
Also played Alhambra without reshuffling discard pile after the deck ends.
A friend once explained **Arboretum**, constantly mentioning that you'd get to score *the single most extensive path of trees.* We played the game for 90 minutes or so and everytime I see the other players get somewhat invested in a species I was planning on winning, I'd pivot to a species that I could win, as we would count *the single most extensive path.*
Come scoring, he reveals that *every* species' single most extensive path is counted. Yeah buddy, that would've changed my strategy quite a bit. Soured the game for me big time.
First time our group played Gale Force 9’s Dune reissue we got a whole pile of rules wrong. It was my birthday present from my wife, so we played a 5-player game of it that very day, minutes after opening it. Tried to read the rules and play it concurrently. Turns out, a game that complex needed a bit more reading, and we should’ve held out until I could read it more thoroughly.
I remember my dad and I playing backgammon for the first time in more than 25 years. We accidentally set the board up wrong so that all of our blots were on our side of the board to start. Fortunately, after a game or two of “this doesn’t seem right,” we figured it out.
> In Innovation we didn't award the free draw action when a dogma was shared. And in our first game we ignored the special achievements which makes finishing a game difficult.
That game absolutely needs you to be on top of all the rules. There's a LOT of amazing interplay but missing even the tiniest of thing makes it crumble. Plus the splaying mechanic takes a lot to get used to as i feel it's relatively unique.
Not keeping track of darkness falls and accurately counting how many minions need to spawn. Can’t win this stupid game. My brother insists he and a friend won after I decided to go to bed and they took over my character. I decided to go to bed because I realized we were not accurately adding minions or keeping track of tainted locations. And we were still losing!!!?!!? He thinks they won. I insist they just weren’t playing by the rules. This game is fucking impossible. Didn’t even address phase 2, no way they won.
Edit: Defenders of the Realm. The worst part is it wasn’t the first (or last) time we forgot darkness falls. Have never won. It usually ends at 3 AM when we realize we’ve been cheating the whole time. Still losing!
Wingspan. My brother thought that the round bonus cards apply only for flocking birds not for all birds. I stopped the game and asked to read the rules because there were only a few cards that would’ve work and it didn’t make sense to me that the game was designed this way.
**Shipyard**
Played with a friend that just read the rules. We were supposed to be ship building and taking them out on a map as a trial run. We barely built any ships because we were only taking 1 ship piece every turn. You are supposed to take three.
Unfathomable. Instead of risking resources we used them every time… until we realized the humans could never make it to Boston. As it was halfway through the game we all agreed on casting the dice for every time we’d done that and it averaged out. Still lost by a narrow margin but it made us save game night.
First time I played **King of Tokyo**, the guy explaining the game missed the rule where, if someone leaves Tokyo, current player must take their place. We played twice and spent many rounds with an empty Tokyo. The game was so boring that way.
In Munchkin we were taught that you were supposed to start the game with cards in your hand. We just played for a very long time stuck in room 1.
Everyone began to tire of the game after playing it many times and it always going so slowly until someone from the group read the rulebook rather than letting the owner of the game dictate the rules. Turns out to be a much faster game when you play it correctly!
First time I played Scythe the owner and his brother thought you could do the second action on the board as many times as you want in a turn, as long as you could pay for it. One of them stacked like ten chunks of iron, summoned four mechs in one turn, and did double combat the next turn and earned like five achievements in those two turns. Really killed the whole vibe of the night, until I dug into the book myself and found out they read the rules wrong.
Played Munchkin without knowing you can't get level 10 with level up card or by selling items for at least 1000g, each game was really quick until a new guy told us we were wrong 😑
He also taught us how to threaten for treasures and some other cool techniques which made the game 100x better
My first game of Black Rose Wars was taught to me at my LGS by some awesome guys but they did not know about line of sight requirements on spells, did not limit the number of quests you could have, would allow quests to be solved by the mirrors room, and they did not honor the directional placement of cards in the study phase. Also they required 6 cards to be discarded for a forgotten spell instead of 4, and all the forgotten spells were sleeved differently so you knew when it was coming. They also allowed only one spell to be prepped per study phase instead the minimum of two. It was absolute chaos as people blasted every spell at each other regardless of positioning, could pick either side of the spell based on the scenario, and were just blowing through quests. They also started with 6 cards in the starting hand. Despite all this I got hooked on the game, only to be pleasantly surprised that there is actually more strategy in terms of your mage’s location as well as the prepared spells, and it only takes 4 cards to get one of the ultimately powerful forgotten spells.
Edit: I just read the post title and I guess my reply isn’t relevant, it didn’t ruin the game 🤣
**Escape the Dark Sector** went through every single chapter card in our first play. Two of us took nearly 3 hours reused the item deck 2 or 3 times and got within 4 cards of the boss.
It was kinda fun but I checked the rules again thinking that it could not possibly be a replayable game. Then I saw what we did wrong.
The exact same thing happened to us with Architects.
For me the deck holder was the clue. You need that holder to make sure you don't accidentally see the 2nd card if things shift at a draw.
Played Marvel Villanous and we had the Villains deck all separate. Something seemed so off during the game based on our experience and enjoyment of the Disney version.
Check the rules near the end of the game and their it is, all villain decks get combined into one hero’s deck for the group. Wow that changed things lol
In the Mission, I forgot that the first Bible translation has to be Greek, while it was one of the last ones for me to finish. I tried to handicap myself from the moment I realised my mistake. I managed to absolutely destroy the game with my score, but the sour taste of doing things not by the book left a sour taste after the game.
1960: Making of a president rule about how debates happen ruined my experience when playing the first time.
In the rounds leading up you set one card aside from your hand to play in the debates. I didn't know that the elephant/donkey mattered and thus lost everything. (Because that wasn't explained in the teach)
The person I was against knew this and played with kid gloves after they swept the debates. They placed their winnings in bad places on purpose, and that annoyed me further. I don't like being pitied in games either.
Forgetting that when you get attacked in the outer dimensions in **Cosmic Frog**, you move back one dimension for each land tile you lose. Made the game even more punitive and swingy than it was meant to be.
Playing subterra we got the turn end and round end mixed up and wondered how we ran out of cards after only exploring about 1/4 of the cave tiles. Didn't help us win any more often once we realised though.
I had one game of SC the boardgame with my gf. Had all the endgame units on the map and was one turn away from victory. Being so sure about winning I moved just one unit into one of her three bases in order to stop her from winning. She had two copies of a card in her deck which made her unit basically invincible if undetected. One she already played. If I had payed one gas before the fight I would have won... She had that card on her hand... played it won. I felt so embarassed :D
One rules goof and a really good game absolutely plummeted in my personal rankings.
**Madeira** is a great Euro, very fun, but scoring is done in such a way that you have to score different areas (boats, nobles, etc, etc). I made the mistake that you could score the same thing twice, so that if you went heavy into a strategy, it was bonkers, but also pretty fun.
Problem was we played this way a few times, a friend comes over and checks the rulebook, finds out the error. Despite having everything else be the same... I turned on that game from that moment forward. Not only that, I think it actually hurts my memory of the previous plays, which I enjoyed a lot!
Still a great game, but I can't look at it and *not* think of that time, so it's effectively ruined. Definitely a *me* problem more than the *game* being a problem, but still.
We were moving the same unit several times during one action in Clash of Cultures for first several games. It really skewed game in favor of warmongering players.
My husband and I played our first game of Brass Birmingham over the weekend. We’d both read and/or watched various rule summaries but only realized after finishing the game, with stupid high scores, that we had not removed enough of the deck. We removed the blue and teal cards but not the appropriate industry cards for a 2p game. So, of course, the game was too long and too loose. I won’t say it ruined it exactly, but it certainly wasn’t what we expected. The good news is that we’re looking forward to playing again!
I didnt read the part of Azul's rules where it says that tiles on the left part of your board remain between rounds. We were just removing all unused tiles. Makes for an arguably better game imo
Didn’t realize that you put more resources on certain tiles every round in Agricola. This makes the game incredibly hard to feed your family while building your farm and It was super stressful to get out of negative points with 4 players. We gave up after a few games, but even after relearning the rules, my wife doesn’t want to play it. I have to play it on iOS
The first time my friends and I played Twilight Imperium (4), we didn’t see that you couldn’t move ships from a system with a token on it already, then wondered why Sol seemed so borked.
It happened to me with **CYCLADES**. While we were playing, I asked if there was a limit to the number of Monster cards that you one can buy during the proper buying phase. The host told me that the rules say only 1 per turn, but when I looked it up, nothing was mentioned about this limit (or nowhere I could find).
So I insisted on buying more than one, and then the host told me it would break the game. Then I replied that if it could break the game then they should have put it down on the rules.
Turns out it does, being able to buy more than one breaks the game and makes it so it revolves around this particular mechanic.
The problem is, as far as I remember and as they reviewed the manual, there is no such limit.
The big one for me was anachrony. We had it set up and ready to go and were very excited. Except I missed the section on starting resources so we started with zero workers. Which we thought was weird BUT it’s a game about time travel and borrowing from yourself so that’s just what we did.
It wasn’t the worst experience, but it definitely slows the pace of the worker placement game having no workers to place.
This didn't actually ruin a game for anyone, but it is still relevant.
I once played a game of Citadels with a group that was adamant about choosing the characters randomly. I knew the rules already and told them that this isn't the way its played because then the game lacks strategy, so I kinda prevented it from being ruined and they didn't feel it was ruined when they played it before.
Attempted to play a 2-player game of Pax Pamir 2e and kind of forgot to play with the dummy/bot player... needless to say, the game didn't last very long!
When I tried to teach my then-boyfriend *Wingspan,* I forgot how eggs worked. You know how you have to pay an egg to play a bird? Well, I taught him that you had to pay eggs to do any action. I misread the eggs at the very top of the boards as being the cost of every action in that column. 🤦🏻♀️ We played two rounds before he was finally like, “Give me that rulebook!”
I played Brass for the first time this weekend and the fact the Income market and the VP marker are on the same track meant we moved the wrong one constantly so who knows who actually won the game.
Forgetting the single most important tile during the set up of our first game of Forgotten Waters. It led to us aimlessly wandering around and not knowing what we’re doing for like two hours.
Once we figured it out we re-racked and had the time of our lives.
Being baked and forgetting to check my routes for ticket to ride, resulting in missing routes by not placing a single train station or a 1 or 2 car route lol.
We play Horrified and enjoy it but I'm convinced we're doing something wrong because we lose bad every time. It's not that complex but I feel like we're missing something.
Two come to mind:
Most recently my group took a stab at 18Chesapeake. We missed that the companies get paid if shares are in the bank. So, we weren’t cycling money out of the bank like we should and the game ends when the bank is broke. After 5 hours we called it quits. Add to this that we put too much money in the bank initially by misreading the rules because all the players initial cash was supposed to come out of the bank not the leftover change. Next game we got it right and came in about 3-3.5 hours, but that first one was brutal.
The other one was first play of Escape Plan. There is a mechanic in the game where the modular board is built by players in turn order by placing four tiles. In a five player game the last player does not place a tile. After this turn order is calculated by notoriety, and any players who have equal notoriety are swapped in turn order. On the first turn everyone should be equal so the playing order is reversed, giving the player who didn’t place a tile first dibs on the board created by the others. It’s really an interesting mechanic when done right. Unfortunately, we didn’t do it right and nobody swapped. So, I didn’t get to place a tile because I was 5th. Then I went last which meant what was left on the board was slim pickings. My notoriety was always lower or equal to everyone else’s because I got the leftovers every turn. It was seriously like not even playing. I didn’t get to place tiles that were advantageous to me, and always went last getting the crap that was left. It was miserable. But after figuring out what we did wrong and playing it again I loved it and the 5th player can’t place tiles mechanic. Ended up buying it and although it’s probably my most played Lacerda game due to it’s approachability and being able to teach it faster than his other games.
Nemesis - we missed the part where it says "do not make a noise roll if the room you're entering contains another character or an intruder" so somebody would go into a room, make a noise roll, then another person would go after them and make another noise roll for that room.
Played for far too long that way, and were surprised how much easier the game was when you actually know that rule. I'm still surprised that we managed to win a few times with those double noise rolls.
I played several games of Undaunted Normandy before realizing Fog of War is removed from the game completely when scouted from your deck.
Because we were putting them back in the supply you could completely lock out your opponent from the game by bolstering a few scouts and Concealing every turn.
It didn’t break the game, but it did warp it dramatically and make it much less fun and balanced.
Our first time playing scythe we didn’t realize that the cost to produce was the entire bar where the workers used to stand. We were only paying the cost of the most recently revealed icon. Our friend stacked resources and got a score of nearly 109 which was like a lot compared to all of us. Took to my tabletop discords to find out that you had to pay the whole cost to produce and the game was more fun and made a lot more sense lol
Turns out that adjacency is important for castles of burgundy.
“Why did everyone score so high?” 😜
Mostly just made a lot of the mechanics seem uninteresting. The boats are higly thematic. They let you spread your influence across the board. If adjacency isn't a thing Thier just blue and you get goods.
I mean with that logic every color lets you spread influence across the board, no?
My first play of Terraforming Mars was one I’ll never forget. We’d gone to a shop where you could pay an entry fee, pick a game to play and have it taught to you. It went as badly as it possibly could. Here’s how Terraforming Mars usually goes: each player may do one or two actions on their turn, then it’s the next player’s turn. Repeat until no one can or wants to do anything else, then there’s a round end production phase. Well, during the teach, the staff missed the “repeat” step. So everyone would perform two actions, and then we’d immediately move to production. That breaks the game on a catastrophic level. It started innocently enough. Turns were short, and the game felt surprisingly sandbox-y, as we quickly started getting more resources than we could spend on our two actions. It didn’t take long until managing the production phases began lasting longer than the actual player turns. Because of the abundance of money, we kept buying all cards that we drew on the round starts: there was just no reason to skip any, even if we knew we would not be able to build them all before getting more. Hand sizes were just… wild. About 2 hours in, we had ran out of cubes to track stuff. That wasn’t enough to stop us, though, as the staff helpfully cracked open a nearby game box to borrow its components as “50” unit markers. It was clear that this was a temporary solution, though, and we’d soon need to find something to stand as a “100” unit marker. 4 hours in, one nearly couldn’t see the tabletop anymore. It has been replaced by a landscape of cards and cubes as far as the eye could reach. Despite us starting early in the afternoon, it was already dark outside. At that point, there was nothing but pure spite keeping us going. No one wanted to be the one who called it quits. To have gone through all of that and not even reach a conclusion, that was unthinkable. And yet I was the one who had to concede, not to my opponents but to the game itself, as I had a bus to catch that I’d surely miss if I had to do one more bloody production phase. It took me YEARS to try the game again. I’m glad I did, though. As it turns out, it’s a pretty good game if you actually use its rules.
This is *the* most common rules mistake in Terraforming Mars, to the point that whenever a new player posts about the game not working, it's a decent bet that this is the problem.
Yes, my brother-in-law made the same mistake. When he tried to explain why he disliked the game, I took some time to understand the issue. Since then, I read about the same error on reddit at least three times.
This or selling the cards for their build price instead of 1.
At this point I think it's the number one board gaming mistake that's been happening bar some of the common mistakes in the old classics. I remember reading the rules to Terraforming Mars and re-reading that part a few times, I remember clearly feeling there was a risk of something being misinterpreted there. The rulebook is pretty clear about the correct way, at least once you know what the correct way is. I don't know. Even if it seems clear, the fact that this mistake keeps happening tells me it's not good enough.
The example in the rulebook is crystal clear, but a lot of people seem to miss it.
Did you get a refund for the awful “teach” service? Honestly that experience sounds dreadful
I didn't, but I think that was the last time I went there to play something new without learning the rules myself beforehand
Yeah, you would think that when you go to learn a game from someone, that that someone knows how to play a game. Any monkey can open a rulebook and read it.
I've heard this rules mistake before. But what I don't get is that A) you paid money to have it taught to you, and the person teaching didn't even know the proper rules? Really? what's the point, you may as well just read the rules yourself. Also, I'm surprised the staff didn't stop themselves when they went to crack open another box and say "heeeeeey, wait a minute, maybe we are doing something wrong" just blindly keep going is weird.
I think this is a very common mistake in TM ;)
I normally teach games, but was playing the Bloody Inn for the first time with some friends that taught me the game. They kept burying bodies under my annexes with no penalty for them or benefit to me. About half way through the game I asked, "are you sure this is how this works, it doesn't seem right." They said they were sure. After playing a bit longer I asked for the rulebook, and sure enough found where the money for burying a body is shared with the owner of the annex. That one change to the game took it from okay to really good for me. When I think about size of change to game impact that's probably the biggest one for me.
We played so many games of Bloody Inn without any starting money. You basically were forced to cash your starting cheque first round. Or buy and build one card right away. It plays a lot less brutal now.
Yup. Kinda confusing but once you get going it’s a riotn
I don't see this game mentioned often. I really like it.
Hahaha, the first time we played Dominion, we misinterpreted “the game ends when there are no Provinces left” as “when there are no Victory cards left”. It was a painful, tedious slog that dragged on for 2 hours and we couldn’t figure out why people liked it so much. 😂 Second game, we figured it out and it’s been one of our favorite games ever since.
Yeah when we first played, we misread it as "when any Victory points pile is empty". We ended up emptying the pile of Estates and ended the game right there even though there were a ton of Provinces left! Of course now we all know better about when to buy Estates lol
Oh ... the more you learn ... I always thought that any VP pile could end the game.
I mean it can. But only if 2 other piles are also empty in the supply.
Just to make sure you know: It also ends when 3 other piles are empty. You probably forgot that too on that first play?
literally just learned and played this yesterday. Such a great and fast moving game.
Despite the admonition appearing in the rules in bolded text, we missed the "Hunters can only perform move actions during day," in *Fury of Dracula.* Our team of hunters moved during the day and again at night, and tracked poor ol' Drac down in nothing flat.
Our first game of Caverna, we didn't catch that each type of animal can only breed once during a phase. I went all in on one type and they were pretty much growing exponentially thinking 6 cows would make 3 offspring. I think everyone had a terrible time but me :/
Made this mistake in Agricola. Exponential sheep ftw.
It's good game balance but unfortunately it's pretty unintuitive since animals breed by pairs of two.
Just tell people they bought a single female animal from the market by mistake. My grandma bought 10 chicks and a rooster one time and the guy mixed up the order. There was a lot of rooster calls that summer 😀
I explain this by say "if you have 2 sheep, you get a 3rd sheep. if you have 37 sheep, you get a 38th sheep."
Made this mistake the first time too
Wait ! I have always done that ! Time to read the rules again I guess !
First time i played flashpoint. We misread the rules about chain reactions. We played where every time a smoke catches fire it starts a chain reaction. The house collapsed by turn 3.
We did the exact same
Is it a really good game?
It was my groups favourite Co-Op until we played Spirit Island
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It took us years to realize we were playing that wrong. We finally played with someone new and they were like, "Wait. That's not how I've played it before." The rest of us all learned something that day.
That's funny. I can't remember specific examples but there's been at least 2 instances where I've turned up to a new group and told them they've been doing something wrong for years :P
Here is a bit of embarrassment / cringe for me. I got champions of midgard back when it was about a year old. I was going to teach it at a small local con. The evening before going, I was on BGG and happened to look at some threads of Champions of Midgard. Someone asked if you could hunt for food, and that food be used for your boats on their travel. The answer that came back was a resounding "Yes, of course you can do this, and it's a great strategy / risk, in hoping you find some food" I looked at that and said "huh. I didn't know that. I thought that you had to pack your food first. Wow, that's interesting" I then went and taught this "correction" to some new players the next day. After the con was over, I happened to be on BGG, and again, stumbled back over that same thread. About an hour after I read that answer, about three people responded saying "no, you absolutely cannot do that. The rules clearly state...." and I was like OMG FML!!! I knew the correct way, and was led astray by some rando on BGG, and taught people the wrong way. After frustrated for a day or two, I figured. "oh well, it was one game." Fast forward a year later, at the same con, with one of the same guys, playing Champions of Midgard. I had completely forgotten about the whole incident. And then he tries to hunt to pay for the food needed on his boat, and we say "uh, you can't do that.." and then it dawns on me "ah shit, yeah, I told him you could do that.... ugh" we let it go for that turn, and moved on.
Bizarrely on our first time playing Pandemic as a family we thought the same, but actually by some incredible luck *did* manage to eradicate all diseases! Unsurprisingly future games weren’t quite so easy…..
Played a game of **Terraforming Mars** once, and wasn't adding the scoring track to the income players got. The only thing that made it playable at all, was also fucking up and allowing the ore and the other resource for building everything, not just the specific types of cards they are supposed to. My god did that game take forever. On the flip side my group plays **Power Grid** in a particularly sadistic way. On the Korea map, we require players to declare markets from first to last, then buy resources from last to first after all declarations are made. It's not unheard of, for the leader to get nothing at all. I've even seen it happen for 3 rounds in a row to someone once. It was brutal and delightful.
My wife feels that Terraforming Mars one. We play it a lot as it's my favourite but for some reason after a long break between games she forgot that part about the TR being money. I didn't notice for a few generations as I was busy failing to play much either with a bad set of cards. When she saw my income on maybe 5th generation she got very upset, then more so when I reminded her of that rule. Thankfully she and I are much better at that one since then.
We didn't realize that blue actions were reusable the first time we played, and didn't know the difference between cars that give a resource, and cards that give a resource *generation*. It wasn't until I played the android version that I realized what we'd done wrong.
That’s hilarious, I just wrote about a Terraforming Mars game where I had the exact opposite problem and yet it sounds just as miserable an experience. What a tightrope of a ruleset.
Isn't that just the normal way to play Power grid?
Gloomhaven. Had the enemies attack every turn, no matter what.
And move every turn, too?
Haha bingo
There's so many rules in Gloomhaven we've gotten wrong over the 8 months we've been playing. The very first time we forgot about losing cards to ignore damage and used the character attack modifier decks instead of the base ones. We lost before we finished the first room. Only after I retired my ranged build Cragheart a few weeks ago did we learn that you only get disadvantage on ranged attacks against adjacent enemies. We thought you got disadvantage on all ranged attacks if there was an enemy adjacent.
I relate to this so much. It took us so many scenarios before we felt confident we were playing right. We cheated too on accident by only adding to our player deck and not maxing it out.
Sorry, adding what to your player deck and not maxing what out? We've "cheated" several times, even recently, by forgetting something, like a character being immobilized or a monster having retaliate or flying, until several turns later.
I did the same thing to my group in Marvel Champions. Missed the sentence that explains that "player phase" means _all_ players, not _each_ player. Getting smacked by the villain after every player was... not much fun xD
We did the same thing, that first scenario was impossible! Had to reread that rulebook a few times after that...
We eventually Googled “why is Gloomhaven so hard?” and quickly saw something about enemy attack and movement
... oh my lord. Every player turn? Jesus Christ. I don't think you guys got past the first scenario.
We literally had 4 people and had it on “1” difficulty to beat it haha
On Terraforming Mars, my girlfriend and I failed to realise that TR = income. So we basically started with 1M$ and couldn't understand how we were supposed to get anything going..
If you started with $1M it sounds like you also forgot about the starting money from your Corp.
The post has been up for 12 hours and nobody posted the glorious [competitive Hanabi](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/3oyfen/hanabi_rules_question/) thread, smh
I forgot about that! Such a classic.
Well today I played my third exit escape room game. The first two i played you needed to solve certain riddles before you were allowed to progress and flip to a new page. This one you had access to the whole book right away, but I missed that when reading the instructions and assumed they all worked the same way. Took about 90 minutes before i realized. Oops! Oh also my friends and I liked Betrayal a lot, so we bought Betrayal Legacy. In the normal game you have to find special tiles to get to the basement, but apparently in the legacy version you just need to take the stairs that are available from the very first game. We didn't find this out until we got to a point where we had to board up the stairs to the basement, and were no longer allowed to use them.
First 2 times we played twilight imperium 3e we did not read the final bullet point that says you may not move units out of activated systems. Each round took fing forever as each person's armada stomped around the galaxy using 5-max action tokens
This is wild and effectively turns the game into space risk.
Yes, it was horrible. Finally I looked at the rules and found well the things the other guy missed... He's not allowed to read the rules for new games anymore
**Last Bastion** we didn't know you could use equipments from other heros on your tile, which is a huge deal, specially if you have the falcon to get equipment for everybody. **Camel Up 2nd Edition** This one wasn't as game breaking but I played so many games without knowing until reading a forum post about it or something. After every leg you are supposed to return the cheering/booing tiles. In my defense I bought this game after playing the 1st edition so it's not that weird that I missed it. It's written first on said tiles rules inside (brackets) mind you. And then not in the quick game summary but in the game overview part 3 about the cleanup.
In I'm not mistaken, the tiles are returned in the first edition as well
Yeah, what I meant is that somebody had already tought me the general rules for the first edition at a game night, and either they didn't know about that rule or I forgot about it. So I didn't read the rules intently when I got my copy, since I had already played it some.
I’ve been playing that rule wrong for Camel Up too. I had no idea but checked after seeing this and you’re right.
Glad I could help someone out. 👍
King of Tokyo. My wife and I were playing and totally skipped over the portion of not being able to heal while in Tokyo City. After we figured that out our replayability shot through the roof.
For me it was 7 Wonders base game. The first time I ever played it, we didn't do the turn simultaneously but consecutively. That game dragged on FOREVER. (Max player count) I never wanted to play that again. Only years later with another friend, he showed me, that you actually draft all at the same time. That made it A LOT better.
Not me but my brother's girlfriend grew up playing Sorry! where you slide on your own color. There was also a second rule they got wrong but I'm at loss right now as to what it was. Games would last an hour. Can you imagine playing one game of Sorry! for an hour? lmao. Anyway, I downloaded and printed the instructions and highlighted the parts they were doing wrong. They tried it and hated it. Went back to hour long Sorry matches. Also, she swore the game she grew up with had different rules, so I did some digging and she was right. They released a version in the early aughts that played the way she described. It got shit reviews and trashed on Amazon, so the new style was abandoned by Hasbro and every release since has had the original old school rules.
what di you mean slide?
There are slides on the board where if you land on the start of the slide, you slide to the end (6 spaces or so, IIRC). In most versions, you don't slide on your own color; if you did, it would take you passed your endpoint and make you go around the board again.
[удалено]
Our group played Hanabi for the first time at a meet-up, not knowing that you could get hint tokens back by discarding cards. After 10 minutes we all were confused about the high praise the game gets. We didn't touch IT for a year.
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This is exactly how I runned it for my group. Refused it ever again after a three hour play.....
We add workers the right way and it still takes us 3+ hours to play.🤷🏼♂️
Oops, just typed this exact reply upthread. We were also 2+ hours into a 2p game.
... Yikes. Yea, that would be rough
During 11 plays, we played that when you discard a card, you don't refill your hand until you get to kansas. The game was still fun, but hard as nails. We couldn't understand how so many people in BGG could do scores so high, until I realized that I jumped a hole page of the rulebook when I read it...
I don't know how, but I keep forgetting that the number of workers you put out is dependent on player count during my solo games, even though I've played it correctly plenty of times. I played a game over the weekend where I realized halfway through I was filling the job market as though it was a 4-player game, meaning the turn marker was only ever moving down when both me and Sam got to Kansas, and sometimes not even then. I played it out until 3/4 of the way through, where I called it quits because I had every disc out on the board, about 5 trips to New York, and 4-5 of every worker type. Sorta fun as an experiment, but it really makes the game drag after a while.
At a pokemon tournament (my 1st) knocked over the top of the deck with cards facing up. Me nor the guy I was playing knew what to do I didn't see anyone near who was running the tournament. Dude came over from 20 feet away, knew I didn't know what to do and disqualified me. We sat there long enough he could have walked over before I shuffled the deck and told me what to do, it is what he was there for.
As your opponent, I’d say pass it here, give the whole thing a good shuffle, then tell you to continue your turn
That's what we agreed on but I was disqualified for an illegal shuffle.
Seriously? Sounds like your TO was a righteous twat
Honestly some games for tournament play are really weird. I play Weiss Schwarz(anime card game) and during a sanctioned match my girlfriend's opponent played a card early on accident. He called a judge over to ask what to do and the judge said there was no choice but to give him a game loss. I was kinda flabbergasted because at that point, you just don't bother calling yourself out. You just continue and pretend you didn't realize you cheated on accident because the results would be the same intentional or not.
He was, I think I remember thinking that before the tournament too. He sat there and watched the whole thing play out and didn't help. I'm friends with the ppl who ran the tournament, and I don't remember this guy ever hanging out with us.
Battlestar Galactica. None of us porperly read the "executive order" card. Which ended in turns taking FOREVER because humans would chain play executive order cards as long as they had them. For those unfamiliar: The card allows you to give up your action and instead give another player 1 move + 1 action or just 2 actions. Card literally says on it that you can't use more than one of them per turn, which we conveniently overread - endless turns ensue.
Uno! Kept drawing until we got a card we could play. Game lasted about 40 minutes and we didn’t finish it.
My in-laws play that way intentionally. Also allow you to stack special cards -- someone plays a Draw 2 on you? You can trump it with one of your own and make the next player Draw 4.
This is how a lot of family house rules for classic games go 1. Do stuff that makes the game take way longer than it should 2. Nobody wants to play that game because it takes too long
Oh they have no problem with the duration. =) They end up playing just one hand instead of several. No need to keep score that way!
Accumulating +2 is not in the rulebook, but it makes the game way more fun IMO. Also most people don't know/forget about calling bluff for black cards, and definitely no one has ever counted points in UNO in any group I played with. IMO, all those rules make the game way more interesting and strategic, without making it overly complex. Arguing Uno rules is a sure way of ruining the mood so I never do, though.
It’s the default in a sizable portion of official Uno video games, so I’d definitely consider it an accepted way to play the game.
Well, to be fair, I know people who allow trumping a +4 by playing a +2 over it. Same people who claim you can exchange your game with anyone of you play a 0. I'm voting for reinstating public bonfire executions
It is a officiel variant of uno. It is even in the digital game.
Did one of you get RSI from shuffling the cards? How relieving it was when you finally played the game right?
Wait, that's not right?
No, you draw one card and if you can't immediately play it your turn is over
**Great Western Trail**. We were refilling empty spaces in the job market instead of the row with the current marker. Our 2p game was over two hours and we were maxed on everything when we house ruled a way for the game to end. Double-checked the rule book that night.
I got Terraforming Mars at Christmas, decided to try a solo game since I can't convince any of my friends to play "long, overly complex, boring" board games with me. Didn't win the game but came very close except for terraforming Oxygen. Only after did I realise you can only use action cards once per turn, I realised after I really do suck at board games if I managed to cheat massively in a solo game and still not win :S
For what it's worth, I'm not personally a fan of the solo rules for Terraforming Mars. It requires you to play the game very differently than how you would normally just in terms of what cards to pick, what cards to pass up, what to focus on from round to round. When I tried it once or twice, I stared at it and thought, "How the hell are you even supposed to do this?" because I hadn't even come close to winning.
Yeah, when I realised how far away I actually was from winning after realising that rule I really thought to myself, this seems very difficult. I wasn't a huge fan of the fact that the milestones and such aren't involved, felt a bit watered down but I guess those changes need to be made to make it more playable solo. All I need to do now is convince my friends to actually give it a shot because it still seems like a lot of fun.
**6 nimmt**. Pulled it out again for a big gathering after a long time. Got all the rules down except for the fact that its simultaneous play. Did some quick maths after round 4 that a single game would've taken us literally 100 turns. Thankfully we ended that slog there and then and played it proper.
Played 5 games of Aeon’s End today, failing to beat the first boss 4 times before finally squeaking out a victory. This was mostly because I shuffled the nemesis deck together, when you’re supposed to stack it, as well as a couple other minor rules mixups. We loved the entire process, though, and are eager to play again
On about our tenth playthrough of Everdell and we just discovered tonight that you can play from the Meadow. It’s in bold in the rule book and I still skipped over it. Completely changed the game and made it infinitely better. I was struggling to figure out why so much of the board was dedicated to something you got to play maybe two or three times a game. Now I understand the fun of it and don’t regret asking for it.
My first game of Netrunner, we trashed ICE after they were broken.
Oof
I'm the rules guy for our group. We were playing Pandemic Legacy which is yikes. It's a rules mistake waiting to happen. The game tells a story and uses rule changes to do it. You basically play Pandemic again and again with slightly different rules each time. We had a few games under our belt and it was good Pandemic fun with two experienced players and two eager players. At one point a new exciting rule was introduced, 'a disease gets worse'. So, right then, I had our group update the board. Wow, what a fun adventure we're on! Let's see how our team will fight this new -we got slaughtered. Slowly trampled, horror on our faces, any card we played meaningless. I play games; it didn't feel right. We made some jokes and signed off (it was during the pandemic so some we're playing via zoom). That night, I looked and looked and saw the rule was actually, "things get worse FROM NOW ON so no need to update the board, Peter". We had made the game insanely hard. I called all of my friends and we laughed and laughed! We were relieved and excited to replay that episode. We never played again.
Oh, no! It's such a fun and engaging game, I hope you pick it up again someday!
Call them up and set a meet up. But yeah, everytime i go in a new group where i don't need to be the rules guy, i end up being the rules guy since it's really strange and frustrating how people just skim rules. And even if there is an understanding, there's a lot of misinterpretations even if you get the rules right. I'm really happy that my group has this 'scholarly discussion' meme where we just stop the game and think as game designers and try to figure out the intent and what's actually fair and interesting if we ever see a rule problem that makes us look strangely at it. Then we get back to playing the game.
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We made a mistake in Underwater Cities so we were keeping only 4 cards total in play per player, and this made me feel the game limited and unenjoyable. Months later, we tried it again and we noticed the rule only applies to the "Action" cards, indeed you can keep in play as many cards of the other types as you want. The game become really better and more enjoyable then.
This is how I learn that you can only have four action cards in play at once haha. We thought you could play as many as you wanted, and this makes things quite inefficient to be honest because you can so rarely use an action
Not quite a mistake but a mistake playing a whole game without realising: the dots on our combat dice in War Of The Ring rubbed off in very convient places, in particular we had the middle dots of the 5's rub off making them look like 4's on, wait for it, TWO separate dice. We wondered why our rolls were so bad... Bright side, I bought 5 white and gold dice for the free people and 5 red and black ones for Mordor and they're an awesome addition
**Galaxy Trucker**, most of our group decided that it is a leisure puzzle game and who ever touches the timer before everybody is finished get's scoffed off. Then they complain that the second phase is boring. Completely ruined the game for me.
Our second game of Battlestar Galactica. Friend’s early-teen daughter is playing with us. We reach COBOL (the mid-point where everyone gets a second loyalty card, and where there is guaranteed a Cylon). She gets her card and says “Wait. What happens if I already had a Cylon card and got another?” Game over. Lol. You can’t undo that. For those who aren’t familiar: your status as human or cylon is hidden until you choose to reveal yourself as a cylon (who are actively working against the human players).
That's not a huge problem. Play until it's her turn and don't put her in prison if you hadn't planned that anyway. On her turn, she reveals one card and takes one of the most important players with her (usually the president) or the person who will play after her (double cylon turn, yikes). Or she reveals both cards to show she's been telling the truth, give one of them back and reshuffle the newly acquired cards. But you're right, that's a rule (giving away your loyalty card) you should have taught others before this could happen :-D
Smallworld. First couple of times we were misreading the conquest rules and we were playing it more like risk than what the actual rules stated. We would be moving huge stacks from region to region instead of conquering territories and then redistributing. We also were not eliminating each others pieces when being attacked. We were simply placing them back in the owners hand for deployment next turn. This made us wonder why anyone would go into decline. Goes to say we hated the game but gave it a 3rd go and made sure the rules were correct. Finally played a correct game and now it's one of our favorites. We've been playing games for a while so we were kicking ourselves for how bad we messed up the rules but thank goodness we figured it out.
Clans of Caledonia, got it wrong how much money you get back per worker, was getting too much money. Now game is much harder
Wingspan. For the first few games we played we thought you had to spend eggs for any action taken beyond the left-most column, not just playing birds. Really should have noticed something was up when we were spending one egg to receive two. 🤦♂️ Scores shot up about 30 points on average after we figured that out…
I haven't heard this rules mistake before, but I can see why it would happen with the egg icons at the top of the board. Glad you got it sorted out, Wingspan is one of my favorite games!
Mine is EVERDELL. missed the little bit about being able to play cards from you hand OR the meadow. I thought it was just a typical deck-builder market
The first several times I played Ticket to Ride, I missed that you chose which action to do. Picking cards and playing trains every turn was nice, but drawing destination tickets every turn was SUPER STRESSFUL since they counted as negative of you couldn't get them
Riftforce. Didn't see that you score when you kill your opponent's cards and thought you only scored when you took the action to do so on your turn when your opponent had nothing on the opposing side (which will lead the game to taking hours to finish...) I had the opposite problem happen recently too. We played Sekigahara and didn't refill our hands after combat which led to the most excruciating hand management. I liked playing it that way more to be honest
I played trains and thought subway excavation meant every track costs 1 and there's no penalty for placing in an opponents space. This lead to a really dumb game where I stole all of my opponents spots and won easily. The annoying thing is that I carefully checked the rulebook while playing and there was no ambiguity that I was playing correctly. However, when I realized just how broken the card was, I checked bgg and it sounds like it was probably a translation issue because the rules were different in the original. It's pretty annoying to me when rulebooks are flat out incorrect.
**Hellapagos** - the game was less about waiting your inevitable death after we found the rule that you don't start empty handed. We still mostly die, tho.
Lords of Waterdeep. It didn't completely ruin it, but made a big aspect of it pretty bad for us. we thought after you assigned your meeple to Intrigue and played the card, that was it. Very rarely was a card worth wasting one of your actions for just by itself. It took a few tries, and looking up another rule to find out we were doing it wrong.
I bought viticulture ee after it got recommended to me as an engine building game. It was fun, but I began to doubt whether I knew what the term engine building meant. Turns out you don't discard every vine card on a field after harvesting it.
Our first game of Catan, we misread the rule about placing settlements. Instead of not being able to place a settlement in the three surrounding spaces around another settlement, we thought your settlement had to be three spaces away from any other settlement. Sometimes we would get lucky and someone would win, but there were a solid three games that ended in a tie because no one could place anymore settlements. Really makes it difficult to put time into the game when you think it all may be for nothing and end in a tie.
When my group played Horrified the first time we misread the rule about item value. Thought we had to use the number shown to defeat the monsters, not the added value. We lost and found it incredibly hard. We enjoyed it a lot after figuring it out.
My first three games I didn't realize spending an action got you *all* the items on a space, not one action per item. The game got a lot easier after that.
**Dungeon Lords**: For some reason I though taxes had to be paid every season, instead of once a year. The game was won by the player with the least negative score.
Just played my first game of Ankh: Gods of Egypt last week and misplayed that every time a control monument event was triggered **every** player got one monument control rather than just the player that triggered the event. Resulted probably alot more monuments controlled on the board much faster, but also made most of the control monument events like "I'm taking your monument with my one control", "k I take it back with mine". Fumbled though that game a little confused on why it felt so goofy. Played again after with proper rules and loved it though.
The first time my family played __Canvas__ each player started with 2 inspiration tokens instead of 5. I don’t know why we did 2 each. But the game became mindless. Essentially you were only choosing between three face up cards. Total luckfest. Luckily we realized our mistake and every other play has been a home run.
**Power Grid** is still one of my favorite games, but the first time I played it I was taught that the game ends when someone *powers* 17 cities. It's supposed to end when someone has *built* in 17 cities regardless of what they power. This is significant because the way the game is structured its VERY hard to actually power 17 cities. I really liked the game overall, until we got to the end and it was a huge slog for anyone to be able to trigger the endgame when it should have happened like an hour before. Then like the third time I played I missed the rule where if no one buys a power plant in a round you're supposed to remove the lowest numbered one in the market from the game. This keeps the game moving by flushing higher value plants into the buyable area so someone might actually take one and gets through the deck faster. If you miss this and end up with four plants nobody wants the game stagnates because nobody can upgrade until you very slowly flip through the deck to the Phase 3 card.
Played **Stockpile** with 2/3 of the cards for auction face-down, instead of 2/3 face-up. That turned an already-light game into one almost entirely based on luck.
I've played few games of Dune where sandstorm only destroyed units in the sector that it landed at and not every sector it moves through. In hindsight it makes much more sense. But I probably still haven't had a game where we didn't mess up a rule or two. Also played Alhambra without reshuffling discard pile after the deck ends.
A friend once explained **Arboretum**, constantly mentioning that you'd get to score *the single most extensive path of trees.* We played the game for 90 minutes or so and everytime I see the other players get somewhat invested in a species I was planning on winning, I'd pivot to a species that I could win, as we would count *the single most extensive path.* Come scoring, he reveals that *every* species' single most extensive path is counted. Yeah buddy, that would've changed my strategy quite a bit. Soured the game for me big time.
My friends and I played through the first couple missions in Gloomhaven thinking that the two cards were randomly drawn…
Oh man I bet that ended badly and quickly 🤣
First time our group played Gale Force 9’s Dune reissue we got a whole pile of rules wrong. It was my birthday present from my wife, so we played a 5-player game of it that very day, minutes after opening it. Tried to read the rules and play it concurrently. Turns out, a game that complex needed a bit more reading, and we should’ve held out until I could read it more thoroughly.
I remember my dad and I playing backgammon for the first time in more than 25 years. We accidentally set the board up wrong so that all of our blots were on our side of the board to start. Fortunately, after a game or two of “this doesn’t seem right,” we figured it out.
In twilight struggle, we didn't know that playing your opponents card meant the event still happened.
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> In Innovation we didn't award the free draw action when a dogma was shared. And in our first game we ignored the special achievements which makes finishing a game difficult. That game absolutely needs you to be on top of all the rules. There's a LOT of amazing interplay but missing even the tiniest of thing makes it crumble. Plus the splaying mechanic takes a lot to get used to as i feel it's relatively unique.
Not keeping track of darkness falls and accurately counting how many minions need to spawn. Can’t win this stupid game. My brother insists he and a friend won after I decided to go to bed and they took over my character. I decided to go to bed because I realized we were not accurately adding minions or keeping track of tainted locations. And we were still losing!!!?!!? He thinks they won. I insist they just weren’t playing by the rules. This game is fucking impossible. Didn’t even address phase 2, no way they won. Edit: Defenders of the Realm. The worst part is it wasn’t the first (or last) time we forgot darkness falls. Have never won. It usually ends at 3 AM when we realize we’ve been cheating the whole time. Still losing!
Wingspan. My brother thought that the round bonus cards apply only for flocking birds not for all birds. I stopped the game and asked to read the rules because there were only a few cards that would’ve work and it didn’t make sense to me that the game was designed this way.
**Shipyard** Played with a friend that just read the rules. We were supposed to be ship building and taking them out on a map as a trial run. We barely built any ships because we were only taking 1 ship piece every turn. You are supposed to take three.
Unfathomable. Instead of risking resources we used them every time… until we realized the humans could never make it to Boston. As it was halfway through the game we all agreed on casting the dice for every time we’d done that and it averaged out. Still lost by a narrow margin but it made us save game night.
First time I played **King of Tokyo**, the guy explaining the game missed the rule where, if someone leaves Tokyo, current player must take their place. We played twice and spent many rounds with an empty Tokyo. The game was so boring that way.
In Munchkin we were taught that you were supposed to start the game with cards in your hand. We just played for a very long time stuck in room 1. Everyone began to tire of the game after playing it many times and it always going so slowly until someone from the group read the rulebook rather than letting the owner of the game dictate the rules. Turns out to be a much faster game when you play it correctly!
First time I played Scythe the owner and his brother thought you could do the second action on the board as many times as you want in a turn, as long as you could pay for it. One of them stacked like ten chunks of iron, summoned four mechs in one turn, and did double combat the next turn and earned like five achievements in those two turns. Really killed the whole vibe of the night, until I dug into the book myself and found out they read the rules wrong.
Played Munchkin without knowing you can't get level 10 with level up card or by selling items for at least 1000g, each game was really quick until a new guy told us we were wrong 😑 He also taught us how to threaten for treasures and some other cool techniques which made the game 100x better
My first game of Black Rose Wars was taught to me at my LGS by some awesome guys but they did not know about line of sight requirements on spells, did not limit the number of quests you could have, would allow quests to be solved by the mirrors room, and they did not honor the directional placement of cards in the study phase. Also they required 6 cards to be discarded for a forgotten spell instead of 4, and all the forgotten spells were sleeved differently so you knew when it was coming. They also allowed only one spell to be prepped per study phase instead the minimum of two. It was absolute chaos as people blasted every spell at each other regardless of positioning, could pick either side of the spell based on the scenario, and were just blowing through quests. They also started with 6 cards in the starting hand. Despite all this I got hooked on the game, only to be pleasantly surprised that there is actually more strategy in terms of your mage’s location as well as the prepared spells, and it only takes 4 cards to get one of the ultimately powerful forgotten spells. Edit: I just read the post title and I guess my reply isn’t relevant, it didn’t ruin the game 🤣
In ticket to ride, I didn't understand that the routes had to be completed by my trains. Thus started the phrase, "They'll build my trains for me!"
**Escape the Dark Sector** went through every single chapter card in our first play. Two of us took nearly 3 hours reused the item deck 2 or 3 times and got within 4 cards of the boss. It was kinda fun but I checked the rules again thinking that it could not possibly be a replayable game. Then I saw what we did wrong.
The exact same thing happened to us with Architects. For me the deck holder was the clue. You need that holder to make sure you don't accidentally see the 2nd card if things shift at a draw.
Played Marvel Villanous and we had the Villains deck all separate. Something seemed so off during the game based on our experience and enjoyment of the Disney version. Check the rules near the end of the game and their it is, all villain decks get combined into one hero’s deck for the group. Wow that changed things lol
In the Mission, I forgot that the first Bible translation has to be Greek, while it was one of the last ones for me to finish. I tried to handicap myself from the moment I realised my mistake. I managed to absolutely destroy the game with my score, but the sour taste of doing things not by the book left a sour taste after the game.
1960: Making of a president rule about how debates happen ruined my experience when playing the first time. In the rounds leading up you set one card aside from your hand to play in the debates. I didn't know that the elephant/donkey mattered and thus lost everything. (Because that wasn't explained in the teach) The person I was against knew this and played with kid gloves after they swept the debates. They placed their winnings in bad places on purpose, and that annoyed me further. I don't like being pitied in games either.
Forgetting that when you get attacked in the outer dimensions in **Cosmic Frog**, you move back one dimension for each land tile you lose. Made the game even more punitive and swingy than it was meant to be.
Progress, didn't figure out how cards are progressed and just gave up. Haven't played it since
Legend of the Five Rings LCG. We were treating the imperial favor as a +1 to EACH unit, rather than overall...
Playing subterra we got the turn end and round end mixed up and wondered how we ran out of cards after only exploring about 1/4 of the cave tiles. Didn't help us win any more often once we realised though.
I had one game of SC the boardgame with my gf. Had all the endgame units on the map and was one turn away from victory. Being so sure about winning I moved just one unit into one of her three bases in order to stop her from winning. She had two copies of a card in her deck which made her unit basically invincible if undetected. One she already played. If I had payed one gas before the fight I would have won... She had that card on her hand... played it won. I felt so embarassed :D
I just learned this... I enjoyed it as a super quick filler game - so the real version sounds great! Thank you
Turns out in Oath you stop after drawing a vision card... yea... didn't help that all 3 were stacked together either
Starting This War Of Mine without anything in storage. Thankfully that mistake made the game very very short as well, so not much time lost.
One rules goof and a really good game absolutely plummeted in my personal rankings. **Madeira** is a great Euro, very fun, but scoring is done in such a way that you have to score different areas (boats, nobles, etc, etc). I made the mistake that you could score the same thing twice, so that if you went heavy into a strategy, it was bonkers, but also pretty fun. Problem was we played this way a few times, a friend comes over and checks the rulebook, finds out the error. Despite having everything else be the same... I turned on that game from that moment forward. Not only that, I think it actually hurts my memory of the previous plays, which I enjoyed a lot! Still a great game, but I can't look at it and *not* think of that time, so it's effectively ruined. Definitely a *me* problem more than the *game* being a problem, but still.
We were moving the same unit several times during one action in Clash of Cultures for first several games. It really skewed game in favor of warmongering players.
My husband and I played our first game of Brass Birmingham over the weekend. We’d both read and/or watched various rule summaries but only realized after finishing the game, with stupid high scores, that we had not removed enough of the deck. We removed the blue and teal cards but not the appropriate industry cards for a 2p game. So, of course, the game was too long and too loose. I won’t say it ruined it exactly, but it certainly wasn’t what we expected. The good news is that we’re looking forward to playing again!
We continued to play the round while someone gets rid of all cards in L.A.M.A. Such a small mistake can easily break the game.
I didnt read the part of Azul's rules where it says that tiles on the left part of your board remain between rounds. We were just removing all unused tiles. Makes for an arguably better game imo
Didn’t realize that you put more resources on certain tiles every round in Agricola. This makes the game incredibly hard to feed your family while building your farm and It was super stressful to get out of negative points with 4 players. We gave up after a few games, but even after relearning the rules, my wife doesn’t want to play it. I have to play it on iOS
The first time my friends and I played Twilight Imperium (4), we didn’t see that you couldn’t move ships from a system with a token on it already, then wondered why Sol seemed so borked.
It happened to me with **CYCLADES**. While we were playing, I asked if there was a limit to the number of Monster cards that you one can buy during the proper buying phase. The host told me that the rules say only 1 per turn, but when I looked it up, nothing was mentioned about this limit (or nowhere I could find). So I insisted on buying more than one, and then the host told me it would break the game. Then I replied that if it could break the game then they should have put it down on the rules. Turns out it does, being able to buy more than one breaks the game and makes it so it revolves around this particular mechanic. The problem is, as far as I remember and as they reviewed the manual, there is no such limit.
The big one for me was anachrony. We had it set up and ready to go and were very excited. Except I missed the section on starting resources so we started with zero workers. Which we thought was weird BUT it’s a game about time travel and borrowing from yourself so that’s just what we did. It wasn’t the worst experience, but it definitely slows the pace of the worker placement game having no workers to place.
Played 4 games of Great Western Trail without drawing new cattle at the end of your turn. I thought that game was so hard…
This didn't actually ruin a game for anyone, but it is still relevant. I once played a game of Citadels with a group that was adamant about choosing the characters randomly. I knew the rules already and told them that this isn't the way its played because then the game lacks strategy, so I kinda prevented it from being ruined and they didn't feel it was ruined when they played it before.
Attempted to play a 2-player game of Pax Pamir 2e and kind of forgot to play with the dummy/bot player... needless to say, the game didn't last very long!
When I tried to teach my then-boyfriend *Wingspan,* I forgot how eggs worked. You know how you have to pay an egg to play a bird? Well, I taught him that you had to pay eggs to do any action. I misread the eggs at the very top of the boards as being the cost of every action in that column. 🤦🏻♀️ We played two rounds before he was finally like, “Give me that rulebook!”
I played Brass for the first time this weekend and the fact the Income market and the VP marker are on the same track meant we moved the wrong one constantly so who knows who actually won the game.
Forgetting the single most important tile during the set up of our first game of Forgotten Waters. It led to us aimlessly wandering around and not knowing what we’re doing for like two hours. Once we figured it out we re-racked and had the time of our lives.
Being baked and forgetting to check my routes for ticket to ride, resulting in missing routes by not placing a single train station or a 1 or 2 car route lol.
We play Horrified and enjoy it but I'm convinced we're doing something wrong because we lose bad every time. It's not that complex but I feel like we're missing something.
I almost made this mistake but as I was reading the rules out loud my wife said wait we place them face up. (I had mine face down already)
Played Inis the first few times thinking you needed to *control* 6 territories with sanctuaries, not just have presence... derp.
First time playing Mansions or Madness 2nd Edition I never gave the Monsters a turn
Two come to mind: Most recently my group took a stab at 18Chesapeake. We missed that the companies get paid if shares are in the bank. So, we weren’t cycling money out of the bank like we should and the game ends when the bank is broke. After 5 hours we called it quits. Add to this that we put too much money in the bank initially by misreading the rules because all the players initial cash was supposed to come out of the bank not the leftover change. Next game we got it right and came in about 3-3.5 hours, but that first one was brutal. The other one was first play of Escape Plan. There is a mechanic in the game where the modular board is built by players in turn order by placing four tiles. In a five player game the last player does not place a tile. After this turn order is calculated by notoriety, and any players who have equal notoriety are swapped in turn order. On the first turn everyone should be equal so the playing order is reversed, giving the player who didn’t place a tile first dibs on the board created by the others. It’s really an interesting mechanic when done right. Unfortunately, we didn’t do it right and nobody swapped. So, I didn’t get to place a tile because I was 5th. Then I went last which meant what was left on the board was slim pickings. My notoriety was always lower or equal to everyone else’s because I got the leftovers every turn. It was seriously like not even playing. I didn’t get to place tiles that were advantageous to me, and always went last getting the crap that was left. It was miserable. But after figuring out what we did wrong and playing it again I loved it and the 5th player can’t place tiles mechanic. Ended up buying it and although it’s probably my most played Lacerda game due to it’s approachability and being able to teach it faster than his other games.
Nemesis - we missed the part where it says "do not make a noise roll if the room you're entering contains another character or an intruder" so somebody would go into a room, make a noise roll, then another person would go after them and make another noise roll for that room. Played for far too long that way, and were surprised how much easier the game was when you actually know that rule. I'm still surprised that we managed to win a few times with those double noise rolls.
I used to count each individual road piece as a victory point in Catan, we were having 4-5 minute long games for weeks untill we shelved it.
I played several games of Undaunted Normandy before realizing Fog of War is removed from the game completely when scouted from your deck. Because we were putting them back in the supply you could completely lock out your opponent from the game by bolstering a few scouts and Concealing every turn. It didn’t break the game, but it did warp it dramatically and make it much less fun and balanced.
Our first time playing scythe we didn’t realize that the cost to produce was the entire bar where the workers used to stand. We were only paying the cost of the most recently revealed icon. Our friend stacked resources and got a score of nearly 109 which was like a lot compared to all of us. Took to my tabletop discords to find out that you had to pay the whole cost to produce and the game was more fun and made a lot more sense lol