Reposted from Gamelier

It’s a bit hard to find, but New Rules for Classic Games, by Wayne Schmittberger, is full of intriguing ideas and creative takes on well-known games. It was originally published back in 1992. As the subtitle says “Recycle those old boards for thousands of hours of fun with new rules for Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Go, Trivial Pursuit, and more.” In modern terms, these new rules are remixes of classic board games.

It delivers on what it promises, but I was delighted to find it more than just a catalogue of alternative game ideas. The author applies successful game mechanics taken from one game to another, and in doing explores the space of game design possibilities.

Already in Chapter 2 “Fixing a Flaw”, the goal is to create a better game by analysing a balancing problem with older board games and testing different solutions to it. In doing so, the author shows how approaches like the “pie rule”, the “bidding rule”, and playing multiple boards at once can be applied to almost any game of this type.

Chapter 4 “Changing the Number of Players” talks about the challenge of three-player games, which suffer from the “petty diplomacy” problem of 2 players easily being able to team up on a third. The author talks about an approach used by a three-player variant of Japanese chess in which the attacks from 2 players on a third is automatically detected by the game rules, at which point the 2 players must form a team, and the third player is given extra advantages that balances the match.

The discussion of handicapping (Chapter 6) is a mine of great ideas, taken from games like Go and Shogi that have elegant handicapping systems. The author has applied these principles to games as different as Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly, which demonstrates how general they are.

Hidden among the number of game variants of Checkers are some entirely new games like Fields of Action and Epaminodas, which use these cool mechanics of moving lines of checker pieces in order to battle each other. Emergo is another one, in which captured checker pieces are stacked on the bottom of the capturing piece, and the capturing player continues to move her stacks like a single piece. When a stack itself is captured, pieces are taken off the top, so that a player can get their pieces back again.

There are also some fantastic chess variants, such as Extinction Chess, in which you need to keep at least one of each type of piece in play, and Racing Kings, where the goal is to get your king to the other side of the board safely.

The book ends with a description of “postal play”, a practice that I had never heard of. Though I imagine it has since been replaced by the Internet, it was fun to hear how players used to send post cards back and forth to each other, making moves on several games at once in order to be more efficient. Apparently some players appreciated the slowness of process, beause it gave them more time to reflect without the pressure. POstal play posed challenges for simulating randomness (such as a dice rolls). The book proposes elegant solutions to these problems, based on using public, verifiable, but random information such as the daily temperature of London of the closing proce of the stock market. There is also the “diceless dice games”, in which players write down each possible dice roll, and get to use each exactly once during the game.

Finally, the book ends with a bunch of guidelines for “creating your own successful variants”, though I think of them as general game design principles as well. Here are some highlights:

• Prefer rule changes that give players more choices
• Improve offense, weaken defense
• Experiment with changing the goal of the game, or the geometry of the space
• Try simulaneous movement instead of sequential movement, or letting players do more than one thing on a turn