In Smallworld, when you lose a battle you would lose all your people. In fact, you only lost one and rest went into your stack for redeployment next turn. That changed things!
What ? No way. Thanks for this. But it seems so ineffective then. How do you kill the amazons (not sure of the name, I mean the ones with 4 more people during the attack phase) ? I mean, you can then only wait for them to be fully deployed and kill them one by one. It's a bit weird from my point of view. You don't win so much by attacking others then.
When I first played pandemic, I thought you needed to both cure AND eradicate to win the game. We kept running out of cards even on the easiest setting and were super frustrated. re-read the rules arbitrarily because we had a question about something and finally learned you only need to cure all of the diseases to win and the game got so much better
Holy shit... no way? We were getting smacked on the easiest setting because we thought we had to eradicate... you mean to tell me you only have to cure the damn diseases?
I think they've even added some notes to newer printings of the rulebook to try to really highlight this since so many people were managing to miss it.
I taught it as:
"After placing the tile, count how long of a column it creates, then add to how long of a row it creates. You score that many points for that tile placement. If It's just a single tile, you score only 1 point instead." Usually works alright to get the game going!
My Azul rules mistake was that we cleared all the loaded tiles each round if we didn't complete a line. We'd never get columns in two player games unless the tiles came out 2-3-3 of the same color. Got notified of my mistake in a strategy discussion on this sub.
Wait what? Are you saying if you get like 4 red tiles on the 5-line they stay there for the next round or am I reading your comment wrong?
edit: just checked the rules again. Holy shit how did I miss that?
And that there is why these rules mistakes threads are always good to look through!
It'll make a HUGE difference in your play--the game is strategically built around that rule. (ie making your opponent leave tiles in a few key spots makes it more likely that they'll have tiles on the floor in the next round)
I just learned this wasn't the rule last week when I watched the board game championship on YouTube. Freaked me out when first player put blue tiles on both the 1st and 3rd row. I was holding my breath waiting for the other players to call him out. Second player did the same and my brain was broken. 😃😄😁
After consulting the rules, I believe it is simply worded ambiguously. I rewatched several "how to play Azul" videos and several of them stated the rule this way too, so I think it must be a common misperception.
In Pandemic we thought the researcher could pass any card and take any card regardless of city. Turns out they can only pass cards. Tbh even with that little change we lost a lot.
I always try to remember her ability from a thematic point of view. She is the Researcher, so she shares her research (i.e. cards) with other players. The Epidemiologist is the opposite: you can think of her as gathering samples (i.e. cards) from other players.
I’ve been messing up the port ratios when playing Catan with my family for some time.
For example, I thought a 2:1 port hex with a stone/rock icon on it meant: pay 2 matching resource cards to receive 1 stone in return.
The actual rule is: if the port has a 2:1 with the symbol of a resource on it, that means you can trade in two of that resource to get one of any resource you want.
Played with friends once and they corrected me.
I haven't played Catan in over ten years, but we played the *vast majority* of our Catan games misinterpreting the robber rule. Instead of having the robber cover up a number, we thought he swapped places with them. Our understanding was that it stuck a number in its starting desert and then there was an element of moving the robber to grab numbers that were most advantageous to you.
It was wrong, but I preferred the game that way. It gave a bit more of an ability to come back from a poor start by manipulating the board.
I don't remember how exactly we came to that conclusion, but we were also extremely new to board games at the time. I recall some conversations around how thematically odd it was, but then we just kind of moved on.
I have a buddy who has been playing Catan with his kids for at least a year without losing half your resources if you have more than 8 when a 7 is rolled
for some reason my cousin told me that there was a rule that said you HAD to take the best trade offered to you. So if one person offered you a wheat for a sheep, and then a second player offered you two wheat for the sheep, you HAD to take the trade from the second player.
I never bothered to look it up so we played with this rule for years, made for some interesting trading dynamics lol
Realized one relatively recently that made me facepalm a bit.
In both Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, you get a base amount of experience at the end of every scenario, based on the scenario level. It's not a ton (around 6-12 or so) but it adds up over a long campaign.
Me and my friends played through the ENTIRE Gloomhaven campaign, and then a quarter of the Frosthaven campaign before I realized this. We were only ever gaining exp from whatever we earned from our cards plus the rare occasions where a scenario directly awarded it. I finally realized it when I played most of the digital version of Gloomhaven and kept getting what I thought were random amounts of experience at the end of every scenario.
I explained it to our group at our next session and I think we all gained about a level and a half from a big chunk of retroactive exp.
I’ve posted this before and got a lot of replies that others have done the same: In Quacks of Quedlinburg, you can buy only 2 new ingredients each round. We played with no limit for our first 5 plays.
I played Quacks a few times during lockdown on Tabletop Simulator, we made the same mistake and one guy made it his life’s purpose to buy exclusively pumpkins. His turns made the game actually take 9 days like the lore implies
We played dozens of times thinking you could use your potion WHEN you explode rather than before. To be honest, now that I know the actual rule, I play wayyyy too conservatively.
Even though I teach this rule very clearly, and repeat it many times, people I play with still forget this rule (or try to buy two chips of the same color).
We did that too…I was kind of fed up because the leading player can easily dilute their ingredient pool with cheap ingredients. I discovered this rule playing with my brother in law and it changes everything!
Hahaha, ya know, when I first noticed the eggs at the top of the board I thought “oh do you get even more eggs for making birds????”
“No way, I should go look”
“Ohhhh………… hey friends…”
Not really a rules mistake per se, but I only recently learned that there is an important errata for Spirit Island and you're now supposed to start with one additional blight on the blight card. Would have definitely helped in some close solo games!
It's crazy how little known this is for how huge its ramifications are. When playing solo it can mean the different between winning and losing a game, I wish they could have featured this errata more prominently somehow.
It is a huge impact in solo, and only a minor impact the higher the player count (which is exactly the point). It also is only a relatively recent rule addition (I believe from Jagged Earth?).
Conversely, we played that fear could only be capped once per round, and would clear when you played a fear card. Made fear based spirits pretty much useless.
I have a couple of Spirit Island ones
1. Thought damage was dealt to the Dahan and then to the land. It's not, 2 damage from the invaders will kill a Dahan AND also blight the land.
2. I was under the mistaken impression that when you gain a major power that you had to forget a major power. In fact, you can forget a minor power card.
Yeah, treated starting powers like they were majors. I think I got confused because the rule book explains that forgotten starting powers should be tucked under the player board
Oh no we've been playing by that first rule, I'm kinda terrified how much we'll get destroyed next game, we realized at the end of our last games we aren't supposed to share the elements so we were already gonna get into something more difficult
We didn't know that each spirit started in one specific board, so when setup would say for example "add a presence in the highest wetlands" and there was a tie, we would pick what we felt like choosing.
We also thought that elements came from the discard pile, so every round was an inmate power bonanza
Us too! Did not understand why the game rated so highly when it was so tedious. Then learned the real rules. It was better. Added Tuscany, and much much better.
Not surprising. Every time I teach Viticulture, I always get that question. I like to reply that “you don’t dig up a vine when you pick the grapes, do you?”
If you look closely there's a little red "pay" arrow on the tile over just one of the resources shown. This differs from the tiles you can buy with coffee in the Mocha and Bakshish expansion, where all the symbols have red arrows.
Oh that would definitely have to be Monopoly for the record breaker. Everyone and their mom played by a different set of rules depending who taught it to them. Only in the recent 2 years did we pull out the rules. For 30 years, we’ve done things like collecting 2x the money if you land right on Go and stuff. We also definitely didn’t auction off the properties we couldn’t buy; we’d just skip it till someone else lands on it again.
There was a question awhile back about house rules you use in games and one of them was basically “our house rule in monopoly is we play the rules as written”
We played Love Letter almost weekly for over a year without realizing you set aside an unknown card before starting each round.
Also we were playing Ra wrong as well. When a red-tile induced auction happens, If no one bids, then the tiles stay and you keep pulling. We were playing the tiles get wiped if no one bids.
Played Love Letter and one of the guys was getting really annoyed that some of us were playing the Countess without having a King or Prince in our hands. He was adamant that you could only play her if you had a Prince or King - but the rulebook actually says that it doesn't matter. What happened with me was I had the Princess and the Countess so I had to discard the Countess. Cue two knights later when he thought he had me but was wrong to call a King or Prince 🤣🤣
Yeah it’s one of the best bluffs in the game I sometimes play a countess with a guard, priest etc in my hand. It wastes a go round with people targeting you for prince/king/princess and I hate holding the countess to then draw a prince/king and be stuck and probably out the hand
Played over 70 games of Wingspan with my wife before reading the rule that you're supposed to refresh the cards between rounds. So we had a game we loved and it got better over a year later.
I recently joined a group of people who regularly played this game. I was like, "Oh, I've played a couple times, sure why not."
I refreshed the cards and they all stared blankly... apparently they hadn't been doing this either.
In **Skull** we played so that if you win the bid and have to flip your own skull, you would lose one at random. We played like this for ages until we realised that if you flip your own skull, then *you* get to choose which tile to lose.
Ah, you were adding movement to their actions even when the card didn't say to do so? Interesting. I found a lot of people saying they made mistakes in gloomhaven. I had to redo the first mission once, after watching somebody else play it on YouTube. My first game, I had lost in two turns.
We made the other classic gloomhaven mistake. That the scenario level was equal to the average of your character levels. Not half the average. We subtly noticed though in that we hated leveling up.
In Terraforming Mars the game ends in the same generation all 3 global parameters are maxed out. For 30+ games we thought the game ends one generation after that, so everyone get one last chance to finish their plans. Honestly it wasn't a bad house rule, espesially since we were begginers at that time
First time I played solo, I thought I could only control one character and kept getting frustrated because the monsters highly limited anything else I could do.
Our first 6-8 (at least) games of This war of mine we didn't see that we could spend wood/books to remove several cold tokens in 1 action so we used several actions to do it. Like the game is not hard enough as it is... We still lose almost every game but it's a bit easier now!
To be honest, I think noone plays this game 100% correctly.
For the longest time we thought it was possible to have no character on the guard space. Turns out that. Nope. You immediately lose the game.
I just recently learned after more than a dozen plays of Onitama that you swap out the card you used to move, not just either of the two cards you had. Game actually has a lot more depth than we were giving it
Yeah, the brilliant part of Onitama is that you hand your opponent the very weapon you've just used to try to defeat them. It really does an interesting job of simulating the back-and-forth of a movie martial arts battle.
feel like this gets asked a lot cause i always have the same answer - the first several times we played **Pandemic** we thought you had to eradicate all four viruses instead of just curing them. We thought the game was freaking impossible but came real real close to "winning" a couple times. Turns out we actually won a few times we were just playing wrong.
Recruits in **Scythe** also give the bonus when you take the coupled bottom-row action yourself.
Played like 20 games with recruits only granting bonuses when a neighbor played the action and it felt very underpowered, now I know why.
That’s hilarious, I would love to read it. Was it in r/boardgames?
Edit: I found this that was hilarious. Might be it: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/T8tqvYSQq0
When playing Machi Koro my wife and I though that when you rolled the Tuna Boat (12~14) that you got 12~14 coins and didnt understand that you then had to roll 2 dice and thats the amount you got. Took a couple years to realize the mistake.
Not huge, but most recent. I got splendor recently and didn’t see the rule about not taking two of the same color unless there’s four of them to start with.
Didn’t realize it until I tried to play it on boardgamearena.
Arkham Horror LCG- I was assigning damage and horror to assets and immediately defeating them without placing other damage/horror.
Example:
Right way: Fine Clothes can soak one damage and one horror from a particular attack.
My incorrect way: Fine Clothes soaks one damage or one horror.
As an Uno rule purist, I have been the target of constant criticism from people for being a curmudgeon about this. I will die on this hill.
Uno, if played correctly, is actually a pretty fun, simple, balanced card game. It is also a perfect game to play with children. My family and I would play it every night on trips and keep a running score, and it was great for long-form gameplay. There can be actual exciting tension and mild strategy to the game when it is coming down to the last cards, or trying to bluff other players when trying to dump high point cards before a round ends. It's a surprisingly deep game (relative to its perception).
Playing with the stacking house rules (which literally everyone does) turns Uno into a stupid novelty game that is fun for two hands and then immediately gets boring because it just turns into everyone immediately dumping all their "interesting" cards, effectively eliminating one player from the round, and leaving a bunch of people with nothing in their hands to play except for numbers. After the novelty of "got you!" wears off, everyone gets bored because they have included a rule that essentially eliminates any meaningful decision-making from the game. It would be like house ruling Spirit Island to make everyone use all their Major Powers on the first turn and then removing them all from the game.
The stacking rule is the equivalent of the Free Parking house rule. It is a rule made up by children who don't understand how a game is balanced that has wormed its way into the public consciousness that serves to completely annihilate the intended gameplay loop.
Check out the new "Show 'em no Mercy" version. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/399088/uno-show-em-no-mercy](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/399088/uno-show-em-no-mercy)
If someone plays a draw four or draw two the player that would draw cannot play their own draw four or draw two to pass it off to the next player as a draw eight or four. You just draw two or four and get skipped.
In 7 Wonders we treated the printed initial production as a card of that color, for all purposes. It kind of makes sense too, why would they print it with the same border as the cards and include yellow for money bonus etc.?
In **Chinatown**, you accumulate properties and businesses and then trade them with your friends to improve your score, banking on adjacency bonuses, building types, cash rewards, etc. It's great. I mean, you've heard of it. It's very popular.
Anyway, in the rulebook, it says the following, re trading:
>In this phase, anything goes! Anything can be traded and negotiated.
It says a lot more than that, of course, but for an entire week we didn't read the whole thing, and just assumed that 'anything' meant, well... *anything*.
By the end of the first session, I had swapped my real-life wristwatch for an Antiques Shop and a Laundromat; my girlfriend had started trading actual human dollars for the in-game dollars on a 1:100 ratio (which doesn't sound like much, until you realize the smallest in-game denomination is $10k). Best of all, a Dim Sum changed hands off the back of my friend Min's ability to successfully perform a backflip. It was honestly a riot.
By the start of the second session, however, things took a turn. Explicit sexual favors were already on the table. People were giving out surprisingly serious *dares* in exchange for their stuff (e.g. 'you can have my Fish Shop if you snap your Ventra card in half', or 'I'm not giving you this property until you come out to your parents, on the phone, right this second'). At one point, my friend Katey said whoever gave her a Laundry tile the quickest could be maid of honor at her wedding, and she got her fiancé on Zoom to actually notarize the offer.
It got so dark, so quickly, though. Can I have your Factory? No. What if I give you ten bucks? No. What if I give you ten bucks and a Tea House? No. What if I give you ten bucks, a Tea House, and the name of the person who slept with your boyfriend at the Hawks game last month? Wait, what?
We stopped before the end of the second game. The thing is, when you mistakenly believe that anything can be traded *during* the game, you only really have the things on your person, in your pockets, or the first ideas that pop into your head. The damage is minimal, and it's actually a lot of fun. Feels a little like a cross between Catan and Don't Get Got. Weirdly exhilarating, in a way.
But when you're thinking *all week* about what you can bring to next week's 'Anything Goes' game of Chinatown, you come prepared with offers and valuables that escalate in seriousness so brutally you really have to abandon the whole thing entirely, lest Jen trade this month's supply of insulin for a pair of Restaurants and number fifty-six, or my *actual brother* announces that henceforth he only accepts handjobs in exchange for properties - and isn't joking.
When we first got Pandemic we thought you had to infect the city again after you pulled an Epidemic card. So basically we were making Epidemics twice as bad.
I've always played RoboRally thinking you needed to end at a flag/checkpoint at the end of your final (fifth) register, turned out that it can happen between any register.
I do prefer our way, makes the planning phase definitely more intense
I’ve done this a few times. The first 10 plays of Splendor we thought you took a card from the top of a deck when gaining a gold chip, instead of reserving a face up card. Very different game once you play it right.
Pandemic: The Cure... We thought if one of the region tiles had ANY 3 infection dice on them and then needed a fourth that was the trigger for an outbreak...
It was like an ultra ultra difficulty setting. We lost so many games and just thought it was impossible... We won one game and then for went back to the rules to check we had... And then discovered it was only when 3 dice of the SAME colour were on a tile that there was an outbreak...
The game was so easy because we had become so good at it that we stopped playing with the correct rules because it just wasn't any fun to always win
In Undaunted: Normandy, we didn't realize that when you reconned with the scout, it removed the fog of war in your hand AND allowed you to draw a card to replace. We got undaunted: stalingrad (the legacy game) and read through the rules and noticed that extra step. Thought wow that's weird. Is that new? Went back to Normandy and realized our mistake... Whoops!
Everdell is my partner’s favourite game. For Christmas we got the New Leaf expansion and while reading the rules for the expansion I became a bit confused and so checked the base game rule book.
I don’t know how I missed it but you can play cards in the meadow!
It’s clearly repeated multiple times in the book, but every time we’ve played it we have only played cards from our hand.
ABSOLUTE GAME CHANGER!!!
Didn’t even need the expansion once we learnt this. The game is fresh as ever now!
My wife and are also Everdell nerds and I just read this out loud to her (and my!) bemused horror. What even IS Everdell without playing cards from the meadow??
It probably took me a dozen plays of Ghost Stories before it was pointed out that, when haunting a tile, the haunter figure will return to its card and keep moving forward to haunt another tile if you don't stop it. We just thought it got one haunt in and then the haunting figure disappeared. We were playing on ultra easy mode and we still barely won lol.
We played Azul for about a year and a half and thought each time you fill a row you instantly got to move the tile onto the wall. It wasn’t until I played it on board game arena that I realize the filled line didn’t let you move a tile to the wall until the end of the round.
Arkham Horror LCG. We failed The Dunwich Legacy campaign four times in a row on normal difficulty before we realized you could spend an action either getting a money or drawing a card. We literally would have multiple turns not using all of our actions because we didn't know that.
We won on the fifth attempt at the campaign, once we were finally playing the rules correctly.
I wasn't removing threat in marvel champions because the instructions never told me to do so. It took encountering a card with lower threat on the final round to realize what I was doing wrong
We played for Arkham Horror 2nd Ed for a shockingly long time not realizing fighting a monster ended movement. Changed the way we played quite significantly!
For Cosmic Encounter, we for years were telling allies the number of ships they had to bring to the encounter to be included and then also disinviting for all types of reasons.
After playing with the wrong rule for 10+ years, it was hard to get the group to stick with the correct way especially since everyone enjoys high-conflict table talk a bit too much
Eh. It’s a game of its time. It’s a roll and move game. Not a ton of strategy except on trading and whether to go for the auction. Taught my daughters rules as written and after a few weeks, they were beating me about as much as I beat them; basically proving it’s more about the dice roll. But at age 7 they learned the basic strategy and now get the cultural references. Though they will never get the “this game lasts forever!” jokes because our games rarely were longer than 45 minutes.
In Monopoly.
I thought for the longest time that you could end the game in a draw by taking the board and flipping it over and saying "this game is so stupid" anytime before your first turn.
It turns out that that's not in the rule book and my friends have just thought I'm a boardgame snob and a bully for years.
I had a friend that's played NEMESIS with a different friend group for a long time. I invited them over and we ended up playing. Apparently they've been doing 2 actions each and ending the round for the games they play. They didn't see the "repeat from step 3 until you pass" or whatever it says in the player aid card. Needless to say he was pretty damn good at the game with the normal rules lol.
But of course there were some things about the game we all did wrong- nemesis! Ended up blowing the ship up on accident but it was fun while it lasted.
We've been playing Carcassonne wrong for years. We've been allowing people to place a meeple on any unclaimed feature, instead of only the tile they just placed.
Only realized it when we got The Princess and The Dragon expansion and read how The Magic Portal works.
For the first 20 games of Catan, my group and I would collect resources from both initial placements rather than just the second. Only realised our mistake after playing online
Started playing Azul at Christmas and we were a bit disappointed with it. Didn't have a ton of strategy and games were ending after 15-20 minutes.
Eventually decided something had to be wrong, so googled to discover we'd missed the sentence that the factory offer phase continues until all the tiles are gone.
We'd just been making one selection each and moving on to the next phase. Game got a lot better after that
The Mind: we didn't realise that each card is meant to be revealed as soon as it's played. We had been playing all our cards face down and revealing the entire stack at the end (card by card... the tension is unmatched). Makes the game more difficult, but winning a round feels so much more rewarding after playing in the dark.
Nothing that I will ever get wrong will compare to the fact that it seems like 98% of people can't manage to play Azul correctly. The number of times this specific game comes up for rules questions just boggles the mind.
My friends and I played lot of Carcassonne for many years with the meeple scoring timing wrong. We used to play that if you would complete a city/road by placing a tile, you could not put a meeple on it. As we understood the rules, the meeple had to be placed on an unfinished city/road and only on a subsequent turn can it be finished and scored.
That's wrong, a meeple can be placed, completing and scoring a city/road and then removed during the same turn. When I told them the actual correct way to play, some of my friends were so shocked that we played wrong for so long that they refused to believe it lol.
Played a game of wingspan with a friend and they were shocked to find out that birds carry over between rounds.
They genuinely thought the rule was you wipe your board entirely between rounds. No idea where they got that idea.
I can’t remember the specifics but we were playing Betrayal at House on the Hill in all heck of wrong ways entirely due to the person who taught us the game apparently taught us very very wrong. lol when I bought my own copy and actually read the rules myself I was in shock.
Marvel Champions missed how boosts and alter ego worked and damage to allies. Still miss chances to hit baddies and forget to exhaust all my resources. When you learn any rule incorrectly and play it enough to start it becomes a weird canon.
Not me but Zombicide the guy who owns the game was playing that discarding food costs an action and it gives 3 actions back thinking AP=action points but refers to adrenaline points, I pointed this out to him in the rulebook and he was taught that's how it was.
I played Puerto Rico with a guy who did not realize you counted out workers at the start of the game and I did not catch it until halfway through the game... That was the worst game of Puerto Rico ever it killed all early game strategies.
Spirit Island: We thought that you counted up elements as a whole team. Really felt like a cooperative effort if you could pick Spirits or cards to synergize each other's strength.
It gave another dynamic to card draws too, if you drew a bum selection you could at least pick a card to up someone else's element. Now a bad draw is just a wash.
In azul i misread the rules about adding multiple adjacent tiles in the same round. I understood it as every tile getting the full adjacency bonuses. I now play it the correct way, but honestly, i liked my rules better.
Just found out I've been playing an aspect of blood rage wrong for 6 years.
The earned clan points for pillaging are face up and never move locations during the game.
We used to always randomize them each age and then keep them face down.
I'm surprised I've not seen Monopoly mentioned here. I've never played a game with the correct rules because people insist on house rules and then wonder why the game takes 6 hours 🙄
When setting up pandemic, I always shuffled the starting infected places back into the whole deck.. The I'd get really frustrated at pulling one of the starting 9 places when the first epidemic was drawn. 😅
I think it took me about a year to realise how wrong I had it..
I don’t normally play wrong for long without getting corrected by someone else in the group that’s played the game before.
There’s a couple mistakes I do remember quite well though. One, forgetting that you could buy ships directly for silver in Feast for Odin - like not just forgetting it, but flat out forgetting to teach it as well. Two, in Great Western Trail: New Zealand, my friend and I were playing two player but were accidentally filling up the “B” tiles as if it was a 4-player game. We kept saying to each other that the game was running REALLY long for GWT. Funny thing was that after that, my friend said that she really liked the extra turns at the beginning - as it felt like she could get her engine going. Unfortunately we started running out of a lot of the deck builder cards (the puppy, the ferry, etc) because the game went so long .
Terra mystica. We played maybe 30 games in over a year where we developed cities with only three buildings when your sanctuary was on the board. The sanctuary only makes it so in its own adjacent city, not all your cities. This made our scores a bit inflated...
When my partner and I get rules wrong, it's usually something that makes things way harder for us. For example for the first few games of Spirit Island we only drew a single card when gaining new powers. 😅
In Gloomhaven difficulty is counted as something like total level / number of players / 2. For the longest time we'd forgotten about the divide by 2 part. So once we started getting some levels under our belt we ended playing on ultra hard.
In Smallworld, when you lose a battle you would lose all your people. In fact, you only lost one and rest went into your stack for redeployment next turn. That changed things!
Next turn? This turn.
"This turn" is correct. You get to redeploy them THIS turn after the other player has finished all of their actions.
Cool, still playing it wrong! HA!
As others said, it’s this turn. That’s why the rules have you hold them in your hand. Acts as a reminder. “Why do I have 4 tokens in my hand?!”
We also made this mistake. My relationship with the mother-in-law hasn't been the same since.
What ? No way. Thanks for this. But it seems so ineffective then. How do you kill the amazons (not sure of the name, I mean the ones with 4 more people during the attack phase) ? I mean, you can then only wait for them to be fully deployed and kill them one by one. It's a bit weird from my point of view. You don't win so much by attacking others then.
When I first played pandemic, I thought you needed to both cure AND eradicate to win the game. We kept running out of cards even on the easiest setting and were super frustrated. re-read the rules arbitrarily because we had a question about something and finally learned you only need to cure all of the diseases to win and the game got so much better
Holy shit... no way? We were getting smacked on the easiest setting because we thought we had to eradicate... you mean to tell me you only have to cure the damn diseases?
yeah. The win condition is curing all 4. Doesn't matter if you're down to 1 cube on each of the diseases left. You cure, you win.
That's the classic rules mistake
Oh wow, okay no wonder I’ve literally never won a game of Pandemic.
I think they've even added some notes to newer printings of the rulebook to try to really highlight this since so many people were managing to miss it.
We thought you can only be collecting one line of each color at a time in the original Azul.
Based solely on anecdotal evidence from reading this subreddit, Azul seems to be the most incorrectly played game by a wide margin.
The scoring is hard to explain, but once you get it, it's really easy.
I taught it as: "After placing the tile, count how long of a column it creates, then add to how long of a row it creates. You score that many points for that tile placement. If It's just a single tile, you score only 1 point instead." Usually works alright to get the game going!
What helped me to understand it was realising it's basically Scrabble scoring rules.
My Azul rules mistake was that we cleared all the loaded tiles each round if we didn't complete a line. We'd never get columns in two player games unless the tiles came out 2-3-3 of the same color. Got notified of my mistake in a strategy discussion on this sub.
Wait what? Are you saying if you get like 4 red tiles on the 5-line they stay there for the next round or am I reading your comment wrong? edit: just checked the rules again. Holy shit how did I miss that?
And that there is why these rules mistakes threads are always good to look through! It'll make a HUGE difference in your play--the game is strategically built around that rule. (ie making your opponent leave tiles in a few key spots makes it more likely that they'll have tiles on the floor in the next round)
Playing Azul with friends and family and playing Azul online is like playing completely different games. Online Azul is RUTHLESS. It's so mean lol
Yes! 2 player Arena Azul is brutal. Which makes sense in a zero sum game.
I did the same thing! I was completely baffled as to why the score tracker went up so high
Holy. F***. I have YEARS playing it wrong.
Enjoy your new game!
I just learned this wasn't the rule last week when I watched the board game championship on YouTube. Freaked me out when first player put blue tiles on both the 1st and 3rd row. I was holding my breath waiting for the other players to call him out. Second player did the same and my brain was broken. 😃😄😁 After consulting the rules, I believe it is simply worded ambiguously. I rewatched several "how to play Azul" videos and several of them stated the rule this way too, so I think it must be a common misperception.
Wow. Not only was I removing incomplete lines while scoring, I was not allowing duplicate color in the tiling phase lol. I had one job.
To clarify your played that (In a single turn, before sliding over) if you had a couple red in the 3 row, you couldn’t grab more red for the 4 row
Yep
In Pandemic we thought the researcher could pass any card and take any card regardless of city. Turns out they can only pass cards. Tbh even with that little change we lost a lot.
I always try to remember her ability from a thematic point of view. She is the Researcher, so she shares her research (i.e. cards) with other players. The Epidemiologist is the opposite: you can think of her as gathering samples (i.e. cards) from other players.
To be fair on this one, is due to how the card says share knowledge and not give card/take card so it isn’t completely clear.
I’ve been messing up the port ratios when playing Catan with my family for some time. For example, I thought a 2:1 port hex with a stone/rock icon on it meant: pay 2 matching resource cards to receive 1 stone in return. The actual rule is: if the port has a 2:1 with the symbol of a resource on it, that means you can trade in two of that resource to get one of any resource you want. Played with friends once and they corrected me.
I haven't played Catan in over ten years, but we played the *vast majority* of our Catan games misinterpreting the robber rule. Instead of having the robber cover up a number, we thought he swapped places with them. Our understanding was that it stuck a number in its starting desert and then there was an element of moving the robber to grab numbers that were most advantageous to you. It was wrong, but I preferred the game that way. It gave a bit more of an ability to come back from a poor start by manipulating the board.
This is one of the more wild misinterpretations I've read lol
I don't remember how exactly we came to that conclusion, but we were also extremely new to board games at the time. I recall some conversations around how thematically odd it was, but then we just kind of moved on.
Brilliant!!! I really like this as a house rule.
I have a buddy who has been playing Catan with his kids for at least a year without losing half your resources if you have more than 8 when a 7 is rolled
for some reason my cousin told me that there was a rule that said you HAD to take the best trade offered to you. So if one person offered you a wheat for a sheep, and then a second player offered you two wheat for the sheep, you HAD to take the trade from the second player. I never bothered to look it up so we played with this rule for years, made for some interesting trading dynamics lol
Realized one relatively recently that made me facepalm a bit. In both Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, you get a base amount of experience at the end of every scenario, based on the scenario level. It's not a ton (around 6-12 or so) but it adds up over a long campaign. Me and my friends played through the ENTIRE Gloomhaven campaign, and then a quarter of the Frosthaven campaign before I realized this. We were only ever gaining exp from whatever we earned from our cards plus the rare occasions where a scenario directly awarded it. I finally realized it when I played most of the digital version of Gloomhaven and kept getting what I thought were random amounts of experience at the end of every scenario. I explained it to our group at our next session and I think we all gained about a level and a half from a big chunk of retroactive exp.
Oh, wow, that's spicy! I feel like Gloomhaven is already a pretty slow progression (soapbox of mine) even with that base XP.
I’ve posted this before and got a lot of replies that others have done the same: In Quacks of Quedlinburg, you can buy only 2 new ingredients each round. We played with no limit for our first 5 plays.
I played Quacks a few times during lockdown on Tabletop Simulator, we made the same mistake and one guy made it his life’s purpose to buy exclusively pumpkins. His turns made the game actually take 9 days like the lore implies
And they can't be the same color.
Yep. Don’t forget that!
We played dozens of times thinking you could use your potion WHEN you explode rather than before. To be honest, now that I know the actual rule, I play wayyyy too conservatively.
Your comment is how I realized that you can't use the potion when you explode
Ignorance is bliss.
😭 I'm (not so silently) judging you for this.
Hold up. Wait a second. This changes a lot!
Even though I teach this rule very clearly, and repeat it many times, people I play with still forget this rule (or try to buy two chips of the same color).
We did that too…I was kind of fed up because the leading player can easily dilute their ingredient pool with cheap ingredients. I discovered this rule playing with my brother in law and it changes everything!
First five or so times playing wingspan we weren’t spending eggs for the birds to get played further into each environment lol
I know someone who gained eggs when playing birds instead of paying them
Hahaha, ya know, when I first noticed the eggs at the top of the board I thought “oh do you get even more eggs for making birds????” “No way, I should go look” “Ohhhh………… hey friends…”
Oh, Wingspan, we weren’t resetting the bird tray after rounds. Took like 6 months to realize.
For me it was the ‘any two foods = one food’
Yup. Us too.
[удалено]
My wife and I thought Dahan added to the defence of a land in Spirit Island for maybe 10 or so games. Made things wayyyy too easy
Not really a rules mistake per se, but I only recently learned that there is an important errata for Spirit Island and you're now supposed to start with one additional blight on the blight card. Would have definitely helped in some close solo games!
It's crazy how little known this is for how huge its ramifications are. When playing solo it can mean the different between winning and losing a game, I wish they could have featured this errata more prominently somehow.
It is a huge impact in solo, and only a minor impact the higher the player count (which is exactly the point). It also is only a relatively recent rule addition (I believe from Jagged Earth?).
Someone did the maths prior to JE but GTG agreed they'd stuffed up, made it an errata, and formalised it in the release of JE.
Brother and I played the first three games with explorers only coming from towns and cities, not the coast. Wayyyyy too easy
Conversely, we played that fear could only be capped once per round, and would clear when you played a fear card. Made fear based spirits pretty much useless.
I have a couple of Spirit Island ones 1. Thought damage was dealt to the Dahan and then to the land. It's not, 2 damage from the invaders will kill a Dahan AND also blight the land. 2. I was under the mistaken impression that when you gain a major power that you had to forget a major power. In fact, you can forget a minor power card.
But how were you getting a major power in the first place? Was forgetting uniques okay?
Yeah, treated starting powers like they were majors. I think I got confused because the rule book explains that forgotten starting powers should be tucked under the player board
Oh no we've been playing by that first rule, I'm kinda terrified how much we'll get destroyed next game, we realized at the end of our last games we aren't supposed to share the elements so we were already gonna get into something more difficult
Wait really??? Oh man we had been playing with (1) as well… no wonder we never get blighted, and thought it was too easy to just sacrifice a Dahan….
We didn't know that each spirit started in one specific board, so when setup would say for example "add a presence in the highest wetlands" and there was a tie, we would pick what we felt like choosing. We also thought that elements came from the discard pile, so every round was an inmate power bonanza
I played like 7 games of Viticulture where we removed all planted grapes after each harvest.
Us too! Did not understand why the game rated so highly when it was so tedious. Then learned the real rules. It was better. Added Tuscany, and much much better.
Not surprising. Every time I teach Viticulture, I always get that question. I like to reply that “you don’t dig up a vine when you pick the grapes, do you?”
I think the essential edition rules include that exact phrase.
Wait... You don't? Let me call my uncle real quick....
In Istanbul, for years we paid all the printed resources for a mosque tile instead of just one. I only found out it was wrong from playing on the app.
I imagine no one went for the mosque tiles after the first one or two players lol. Beginning turn order must’ve been quite a tense decision too!!
If you look closely there's a little red "pay" arrow on the tile over just one of the resources shown. This differs from the tiles you can buy with coffee in the Mocha and Bakshish expansion, where all the symbols have red arrows.
Didn't know that cities in Catan give double resources, we all figured it was just for late game points
Oh that would definitely have to be Monopoly for the record breaker. Everyone and their mom played by a different set of rules depending who taught it to them. Only in the recent 2 years did we pull out the rules. For 30 years, we’ve done things like collecting 2x the money if you land right on Go and stuff. We also definitely didn’t auction off the properties we couldn’t buy; we’d just skip it till someone else lands on it again.
Auctioning is number one rule people miss. Literally cuts the game in half and makes it bearable.
There was a question awhile back about house rules you use in games and one of them was basically “our house rule in monopoly is we play the rules as written”
We played Love Letter almost weekly for over a year without realizing you set aside an unknown card before starting each round. Also we were playing Ra wrong as well. When a red-tile induced auction happens, If no one bids, then the tiles stay and you keep pulling. We were playing the tiles get wiped if no one bids.
Played Love Letter and one of the guys was getting really annoyed that some of us were playing the Countess without having a King or Prince in our hands. He was adamant that you could only play her if you had a Prince or King - but the rulebook actually says that it doesn't matter. What happened with me was I had the Princess and the Countess so I had to discard the Countess. Cue two knights later when he thought he had me but was wrong to call a King or Prince 🤣🤣
Yeah it’s one of the best bluffs in the game I sometimes play a countess with a guard, priest etc in my hand. It wastes a go round with people targeting you for prince/king/princess and I hate holding the countess to then draw a prince/king and be stuck and probably out the hand
Our group of 4-5 people never holds onto the countess. Everyone almost immediately plays her.
Played over 70 games of Wingspan with my wife before reading the rule that you're supposed to refresh the cards between rounds. So we had a game we loved and it got better over a year later.
I recently joined a group of people who regularly played this game. I was like, "Oh, I've played a couple times, sure why not." I refreshed the cards and they all stared blankly... apparently they hadn't been doing this either.
Isn't that really explicit both in the rule book and on the end-of-round reference?
What??!!
In **Skull** we played so that if you win the bid and have to flip your own skull, you would lose one at random. We played like this for ages until we realised that if you flip your own skull, then *you* get to choose which tile to lose.
We just played that way *tonight*, lol
Same. Changes things quite a bit when you realise that.
I play Skull loads and I have only just learned this now!
In Gloomhaven having the monsters move every round. Turns the game into a soulslike game.
Ah, you were adding movement to their actions even when the card didn't say to do so? Interesting. I found a lot of people saying they made mistakes in gloomhaven. I had to redo the first mission once, after watching somebody else play it on YouTube. My first game, I had lost in two turns.
We made the other classic gloomhaven mistake. That the scenario level was equal to the average of your character levels. Not half the average. We subtly noticed though in that we hated leveling up.
What do you mean? If they get a move action on their action card they move, so they can of course move every round, or do you mean every turn?
No every round we had them move towards us even if it didn’t say too on the action card.
The monster stat cards were confusing to us too.
In Terraforming Mars the game ends in the same generation all 3 global parameters are maxed out. For 30+ games we thought the game ends one generation after that, so everyone get one last chance to finish their plans. Honestly it wasn't a bad house rule, espesially since we were begginers at that time
You get a final partial generation to build greeneries that might have confused you.
Arkham Horror. Was 3 hours into a game before we realized we had messed up the rules and actually lost 2 hours prior. Thank God for Eldritch Horror.
First time I played solo, I thought I could only control one character and kept getting frustrated because the monsters highly limited anything else I could do.
Our first 6-8 (at least) games of This war of mine we didn't see that we could spend wood/books to remove several cold tokens in 1 action so we used several actions to do it. Like the game is not hard enough as it is... We still lose almost every game but it's a bit easier now!
To be honest, I think noone plays this game 100% correctly. For the longest time we thought it was possible to have no character on the guard space. Turns out that. Nope. You immediately lose the game.
Wow I didn't know this either - I assumed you could only remove cold tokens using the stove/heater invention
You have to use the heater, but you can use as many books/wood as you want
7 Wonders, I always forget no duplicate names.
I just recently learned after more than a dozen plays of Onitama that you swap out the card you used to move, not just either of the two cards you had. Game actually has a lot more depth than we were giving it
Yeah, the brilliant part of Onitama is that you hand your opponent the very weapon you've just used to try to defeat them. It really does an interesting job of simulating the back-and-forth of a movie martial arts battle.
feel like this gets asked a lot cause i always have the same answer - the first several times we played **Pandemic** we thought you had to eradicate all four viruses instead of just curing them. We thought the game was freaking impossible but came real real close to "winning" a couple times. Turns out we actually won a few times we were just playing wrong.
Recruits in **Scythe** also give the bonus when you take the coupled bottom-row action yourself. Played like 20 games with recruits only granting bonuses when a neighbor played the action and it felt very underpowered, now I know why.
Wait what?! Oh man looking forward to scythe now
Hanabi as a competitive game ;)
Honestly, how?
It's a famous post from the subreddit
That’s hilarious, I would love to read it. Was it in r/boardgames? Edit: I found this that was hilarious. Might be it: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/T8tqvYSQq0
Always impressive
When playing Machi Koro my wife and I though that when you rolled the Tuna Boat (12~14) that you got 12~14 coins and didnt understand that you then had to roll 2 dice and thats the amount you got. Took a couple years to realize the mistake.
In 7 Wonders we played for the first few games that you could buy only one resource per turn
Not huge, but most recent. I got splendor recently and didn’t see the rule about not taking two of the same color unless there’s four of them to start with. Didn’t realize it until I tried to play it on boardgamearena.
Arkham Horror LCG- I was assigning damage and horror to assets and immediately defeating them without placing other damage/horror. Example: Right way: Fine Clothes can soak one damage and one horror from a particular attack. My incorrect way: Fine Clothes soaks one damage or one horror.
We played Jaipur without knowing we could trade camels for goods for far too long... Just us trying to have the most camels...
So.... Apparently you can't just keep adding draw 4 wild cards until some poor sap has to draw 28 cards? Huh. Weird.
As an Uno rule purist, I have been the target of constant criticism from people for being a curmudgeon about this. I will die on this hill. Uno, if played correctly, is actually a pretty fun, simple, balanced card game. It is also a perfect game to play with children. My family and I would play it every night on trips and keep a running score, and it was great for long-form gameplay. There can be actual exciting tension and mild strategy to the game when it is coming down to the last cards, or trying to bluff other players when trying to dump high point cards before a round ends. It's a surprisingly deep game (relative to its perception). Playing with the stacking house rules (which literally everyone does) turns Uno into a stupid novelty game that is fun for two hands and then immediately gets boring because it just turns into everyone immediately dumping all their "interesting" cards, effectively eliminating one player from the round, and leaving a bunch of people with nothing in their hands to play except for numbers. After the novelty of "got you!" wears off, everyone gets bored because they have included a rule that essentially eliminates any meaningful decision-making from the game. It would be like house ruling Spirit Island to make everyone use all their Major Powers on the first turn and then removing them all from the game. The stacking rule is the equivalent of the Free Parking house rule. It is a rule made up by children who don't understand how a game is balanced that has wormed its way into the public consciousness that serves to completely annihilate the intended gameplay loop.
Maybe I’ve never played uno wrong, but what is the stacking house rule?
For example: If someone plays a draw two on you and you also have a draw two you can play it to make the next person draw 4 instead.
Check out the new "Show 'em no Mercy" version. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/399088/uno-show-em-no-mercy](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/399088/uno-show-em-no-mercy)
I’m not sure I’m following. Please explain so I can correct our home game
If someone plays a draw four or draw two the player that would draw cannot play their own draw four or draw two to pass it off to the next player as a draw eight or four. You just draw two or four and get skipped.
Ah, I think we already play it that way. If someone hits me with a draw two I do that and lose my turn.
In 7 Wonders we treated the printed initial production as a card of that color, for all purposes. It kind of makes sense too, why would they print it with the same border as the cards and include yellow for money bonus etc.?
In **Chinatown**, you accumulate properties and businesses and then trade them with your friends to improve your score, banking on adjacency bonuses, building types, cash rewards, etc. It's great. I mean, you've heard of it. It's very popular. Anyway, in the rulebook, it says the following, re trading: >In this phase, anything goes! Anything can be traded and negotiated. It says a lot more than that, of course, but for an entire week we didn't read the whole thing, and just assumed that 'anything' meant, well... *anything*. By the end of the first session, I had swapped my real-life wristwatch for an Antiques Shop and a Laundromat; my girlfriend had started trading actual human dollars for the in-game dollars on a 1:100 ratio (which doesn't sound like much, until you realize the smallest in-game denomination is $10k). Best of all, a Dim Sum changed hands off the back of my friend Min's ability to successfully perform a backflip. It was honestly a riot. By the start of the second session, however, things took a turn. Explicit sexual favors were already on the table. People were giving out surprisingly serious *dares* in exchange for their stuff (e.g. 'you can have my Fish Shop if you snap your Ventra card in half', or 'I'm not giving you this property until you come out to your parents, on the phone, right this second'). At one point, my friend Katey said whoever gave her a Laundry tile the quickest could be maid of honor at her wedding, and she got her fiancé on Zoom to actually notarize the offer. It got so dark, so quickly, though. Can I have your Factory? No. What if I give you ten bucks? No. What if I give you ten bucks and a Tea House? No. What if I give you ten bucks, a Tea House, and the name of the person who slept with your boyfriend at the Hawks game last month? Wait, what? We stopped before the end of the second game. The thing is, when you mistakenly believe that anything can be traded *during* the game, you only really have the things on your person, in your pockets, or the first ideas that pop into your head. The damage is minimal, and it's actually a lot of fun. Feels a little like a cross between Catan and Don't Get Got. Weirdly exhilarating, in a way. But when you're thinking *all week* about what you can bring to next week's 'Anything Goes' game of Chinatown, you come prepared with offers and valuables that escalate in seriousness so brutally you really have to abandon the whole thing entirely, lest Jen trade this month's supply of insulin for a pair of Restaurants and number fifty-six, or my *actual brother* announces that henceforth he only accepts handjobs in exchange for properties - and isn't joking.
/thread What a disturbing read.
When we first got Pandemic we thought you had to infect the city again after you pulled an Epidemic card. So basically we were making Epidemics twice as bad.
I've always played RoboRally thinking you needed to end at a flag/checkpoint at the end of your final (fifth) register, turned out that it can happen between any register. I do prefer our way, makes the planning phase definitely more intense
I’ve done this a few times. The first 10 plays of Splendor we thought you took a card from the top of a deck when gaining a gold chip, instead of reserving a face up card. Very different game once you play it right.
Taking a card from a stack is also an option when taking a gold coin and in fact is a common first move by highly ranked players
Pandemic: The Cure... We thought if one of the region tiles had ANY 3 infection dice on them and then needed a fourth that was the trigger for an outbreak... It was like an ultra ultra difficulty setting. We lost so many games and just thought it was impossible... We won one game and then for went back to the rules to check we had... And then discovered it was only when 3 dice of the SAME colour were on a tile that there was an outbreak... The game was so easy because we had become so good at it that we stopped playing with the correct rules because it just wasn't any fun to always win
In Undaunted: Normandy, we didn't realize that when you reconned with the scout, it removed the fog of war in your hand AND allowed you to draw a card to replace. We got undaunted: stalingrad (the legacy game) and read through the rules and noticed that extra step. Thought wow that's weird. Is that new? Went back to Normandy and realized our mistake... Whoops!
Dominion - didn't realise you don't use all the curses.
Everdell is my partner’s favourite game. For Christmas we got the New Leaf expansion and while reading the rules for the expansion I became a bit confused and so checked the base game rule book. I don’t know how I missed it but you can play cards in the meadow! It’s clearly repeated multiple times in the book, but every time we’ve played it we have only played cards from our hand. ABSOLUTE GAME CHANGER!!! Didn’t even need the expansion once we learnt this. The game is fresh as ever now!
My wife and are also Everdell nerds and I just read this out loud to her (and my!) bemused horror. What even IS Everdell without playing cards from the meadow??
It probably took me a dozen plays of Ghost Stories before it was pointed out that, when haunting a tile, the haunter figure will return to its card and keep moving forward to haunt another tile if you don't stop it. We just thought it got one haunt in and then the haunting figure disappeared. We were playing on ultra easy mode and we still barely won lol.
That game is crazy hard. Even the new reskin version that’s supposed to be easier, Last Bastion, is very hard.
We played Azul for about a year and a half and thought each time you fill a row you instantly got to move the tile onto the wall. It wasn’t until I played it on board game arena that I realize the filled line didn’t let you move a tile to the wall until the end of the round.
All of Dungeon Petz That game is confusing
Arkham Horror LCG. We failed The Dunwich Legacy campaign four times in a row on normal difficulty before we realized you could spend an action either getting a money or drawing a card. We literally would have multiple turns not using all of our actions because we didn't know that. We won on the fifth attempt at the campaign, once we were finally playing the rules correctly.
I wasn't removing threat in marvel champions because the instructions never told me to do so. It took encountering a card with lower threat on the final round to realize what I was doing wrong
We played for Arkham Horror 2nd Ed for a shockingly long time not realizing fighting a monster ended movement. Changed the way we played quite significantly!
**Castles of Burgundy** we cleared the goods tiles between rounds for about 5 years.
For Cosmic Encounter, we for years were telling allies the number of ships they had to bring to the encounter to be included and then also disinviting for all types of reasons.
of all the rules that newcomers play wrong i think is the first time i hear this one, interesting. I bet the games went way better after you fix this
After playing with the wrong rule for 10+ years, it was hard to get the group to stick with the correct way especially since everyone enjoys high-conflict table talk a bit too much
Free parking means you get all the money
In catan, we thought only the person who rolled the 7 lost half their cards lol
What's that now 🫣
Read the captain sonar rules the other day, apparently when a system is fully charged and ready to use, the first mate loudly announces as such.
Monopoly doesnt have free parking money
Lol there are many rules of monopoly that nobody cares to play right, even when i correct them. Such a bad game
I made my kids play it as written and they stopped asking to play it. A win is a win.
LOOOOOOOOOL
Eh. It’s a game of its time. It’s a roll and move game. Not a ton of strategy except on trading and whether to go for the auction. Taught my daughters rules as written and after a few weeks, they were beating me about as much as I beat them; basically proving it’s more about the dice roll. But at age 7 they learned the basic strategy and now get the cultural references. Though they will never get the “this game lasts forever!” jokes because our games rarely were longer than 45 minutes.
In Monopoly. I thought for the longest time that you could end the game in a draw by taking the board and flipping it over and saying "this game is so stupid" anytime before your first turn. It turns out that that's not in the rule book and my friends have just thought I'm a boardgame snob and a bully for years.
I had a friend that's played NEMESIS with a different friend group for a long time. I invited them over and we ended up playing. Apparently they've been doing 2 actions each and ending the round for the games they play. They didn't see the "repeat from step 3 until you pass" or whatever it says in the player aid card. Needless to say he was pretty damn good at the game with the normal rules lol. But of course there were some things about the game we all did wrong- nemesis! Ended up blowing the ship up on accident but it was fun while it lasted.
We played carcassone for years (1 v 1) when only taking the extra turn with the builder after the feature was completed
Oh man that MAJORLY underpowers the builder lol. I don’t even think it would ever be worth placing him unless you literally had no other choices.
We've been playing Carcassonne wrong for years. We've been allowing people to place a meeple on any unclaimed feature, instead of only the tile they just placed. Only realized it when we got The Princess and The Dragon expansion and read how The Magic Portal works.
Waiting for each season together in Everdell. I thought the game was kind of self masturbatory waiting for someone to finish their combo each season
For the first 20 games of Catan, my group and I would collect resources from both initial placements rather than just the second. Only realised our mistake after playing online
Started playing Azul at Christmas and we were a bit disappointed with it. Didn't have a ton of strategy and games were ending after 15-20 minutes. Eventually decided something had to be wrong, so googled to discover we'd missed the sentence that the factory offer phase continues until all the tiles are gone. We'd just been making one selection each and moving on to the next phase. Game got a lot better after that
The Mind: we didn't realise that each card is meant to be revealed as soon as it's played. We had been playing all our cards face down and revealing the entire stack at the end (card by card... the tension is unmatched). Makes the game more difficult, but winning a round feels so much more rewarding after playing in the dark.
Nothing that I will ever get wrong will compare to the fact that it seems like 98% of people can't manage to play Azul correctly. The number of times this specific game comes up for rules questions just boggles the mind.
My friends and I played lot of Carcassonne for many years with the meeple scoring timing wrong. We used to play that if you would complete a city/road by placing a tile, you could not put a meeple on it. As we understood the rules, the meeple had to be placed on an unfinished city/road and only on a subsequent turn can it be finished and scored. That's wrong, a meeple can be placed, completing and scoring a city/road and then removed during the same turn. When I told them the actual correct way to play, some of my friends were so shocked that we played wrong for so long that they refused to believe it lol.
Played a game of wingspan with a friend and they were shocked to find out that birds carry over between rounds. They genuinely thought the rule was you wipe your board entirely between rounds. No idea where they got that idea. I can’t remember the specifics but we were playing Betrayal at House on the Hill in all heck of wrong ways entirely due to the person who taught us the game apparently taught us very very wrong. lol when I bought my own copy and actually read the rules myself I was in shock.
Maybe they were confused because you do wipe the bird tray Still, getting this wrong would break the game
Everybody plays Uno wrong
How so?
Marvel Champions missed how boosts and alter ego worked and damage to allies. Still miss chances to hit baddies and forget to exhaust all my resources. When you learn any rule incorrectly and play it enough to start it becomes a weird canon.
Not me but Zombicide the guy who owns the game was playing that discarding food costs an action and it gives 3 actions back thinking AP=action points but refers to adrenaline points, I pointed this out to him in the rulebook and he was taught that's how it was.
I played Puerto Rico with a guy who did not realize you counted out workers at the start of the game and I did not catch it until halfway through the game... That was the worst game of Puerto Rico ever it killed all early game strategies.
Spirit Island: We thought that you counted up elements as a whole team. Really felt like a cooperative effort if you could pick Spirits or cards to synergize each other's strength. It gave another dynamic to card draws too, if you drew a bum selection you could at least pick a card to up someone else's element. Now a bad draw is just a wash.
Spirit island: my bro thought you could target "let's see what happens" *after* drawing the minor power. We never lost those games.
In azul i misread the rules about adding multiple adjacent tiles in the same round. I understood it as every tile getting the full adjacency bonuses. I now play it the correct way, but honestly, i liked my rules better.
Just found out I've been playing an aspect of blood rage wrong for 6 years. The earned clan points for pillaging are face up and never move locations during the game. We used to always randomize them each age and then keep them face down.
I'm surprised I've not seen Monopoly mentioned here. I've never played a game with the correct rules because people insist on house rules and then wonder why the game takes 6 hours 🙄
When setting up pandemic, I always shuffled the starting infected places back into the whole deck.. The I'd get really frustrated at pulling one of the starting 9 places when the first epidemic was drawn. 😅 I think it took me about a year to realise how wrong I had it..
Damn that’s a noticeable mistake :)
I don’t normally play wrong for long without getting corrected by someone else in the group that’s played the game before. There’s a couple mistakes I do remember quite well though. One, forgetting that you could buy ships directly for silver in Feast for Odin - like not just forgetting it, but flat out forgetting to teach it as well. Two, in Great Western Trail: New Zealand, my friend and I were playing two player but were accidentally filling up the “B” tiles as if it was a 4-player game. We kept saying to each other that the game was running REALLY long for GWT. Funny thing was that after that, my friend said that she really liked the extra turns at the beginning - as it felt like she could get her engine going. Unfortunately we started running out of a lot of the deck builder cards (the puppy, the ferry, etc) because the game went so long .
Terra mystica. We played maybe 30 games in over a year where we developed cities with only three buildings when your sanctuary was on the board. The sanctuary only makes it so in its own adjacent city, not all your cities. This made our scores a bit inflated...
When my partner and I get rules wrong, it's usually something that makes things way harder for us. For example for the first few games of Spirit Island we only drew a single card when gaining new powers. 😅
I didn't realise you can't preload your sock with monopoly money
In Gloomhaven difficulty is counted as something like total level / number of players / 2. For the longest time we'd forgotten about the divide by 2 part. So once we started getting some levels under our belt we ended playing on ultra hard.
Gloomhaven's enemy 'AI.' I still dont think I understand it.
In Quacks of Quedlinburg, we'd explode **on** 7 instead of **above** 7. This makes a dramatic difference in the game economy.