Games are listed alphabetically by their original title from the late 90s/early 2000s.
I'll be the first to acknowledge that these are mostly older games - anyone who wants to email me more recent "lost & found" rules at fluffdaddy@gmail.com is welcome to do so - if I get enough, I'll create a new version of this post.
Frankly, creating this page is depressing. Is it not punishment enough that I forget these rules? Now I have to go and do something silly like publicize that to the Internet gaming community.
But mine is a cautionary tale... hopefully, the rules that I (and others... thank God I'm not alone) have missed will help our faithful visitors play these classic games right the FIRST time.
1830
Bas van der Meer
The very first time we played 1830 we thought that once green, and later brown tracks were available, we thought you could just play start building such a tile on an empty hexagon: very soon the map was covered with the most complex tracks. Of course, with the rules written in that famous classic Avalon Hill style it's hard to get every rule correct, even after multiple times of playing and multiple re-reads of the rules.
[Editor's note: my first - and only - play of 1830 was aborted at 6 hours less than halfway through the game. Bas is not kidding about AH rulebooks.]
Acquire
Dennis Matheson
In Acquire, once all seven chain markers are in use you cannot start a new chain or place a tile that would start a new chain. For some reason when I first started playing I learned it as you *could* place a tile to start a new chain even if there were already seven chains on the board. This lead to some interesting strategies where you could build a large "unnamed" chain and then connect it to a chain you controlled at an opportune time, instantly jumping it from three or four tiles to a dozen or more on a single play. Definitely a difference in strategy.
Adel Verpflichtet
Craig Berg
Try a game of this where no one gets a starting hand! Fortunately we figured out something was wrong by the 4th turn when everyone was still in the starting square and rapidly running out of checks.
Airlines
Steve Thomas
Not a misunderstanding as such, but pretty funny.
In the game Airlines, you start by shuffling some number (3?) "Wertung" cards into a large pile of cards, and hold a scoring round when one turns up, and another when the pile is exhausted.
Naturally, we once forgot to add the Wertungs. Our comments were all along the lines "we must get one soon" but none of us twigged the true explanation until there were too few cards left in the pile for the necessary Wertungs to be present.
Al Cabohne
Doug Adams, Mark Jackson, and a host of others...
Due to an early rule mistranslation, none of us could beat the Bean Mafia. Despite what the first translation of the rules say, the Bean Mafia does not EVER get the top card of the discard pile.
[Editor's Note: Ah, rules translations - back in the olden days when they were done by erstwhile gamers feeding Babelfish one line of German text at a time.]
Attika
Rodney Somerstein
I completely missed the part about placing the top four buildings (one from each stack) on your mat at the beginning of the game. (Previously I had missed the fact that you CAN place new tiles and leave enclosed holes/spaces in the playing area). It only took my 9 plays to learn this last one about the starting buildings. This is certainly the easiest to learn game that I am aware of my reading the rules incorrectly, though.
Luckily, the game turned out to be very playable even with these errors.
Awful Green Things From Outer Space
Matthew Baldwin
The first time I ever played "Awful Things From Outer Space", we missed the rule about spreading the initial aliens throughout the ship; my opponent dropped all ten or so monsters into a single room. The entire game, then, just consisted of this huge alien mob careening from room to room, completely decimating out any and all human forces it encountered. By the end we were convinced that we had just found the most unbalanaced game of all time ...
Babel
Doug Orleans and a host of others
Due to a mistranslation, we had been playing Babel with the rule that the game only ended if the score were 15 or more to 9 or less, or if one person had 20, whereas the real rule is that the game can also end if either player has 9 or less after either player gets to 15 (i.e. you can be ahead 15-10 and then lose 10-9). (Note: Thanks to Greg Aleknevicus for pointing this out to so many of us!)
Big Boss
Dave Arnott
A "3 stage" card, eg. allows you to add a single stage to a stack that already has two stages. It does not allow you to add 3 stages. It is not a "three stage" card, but rather a "third stage" card.
When we first played Big Boss, we took the Etage cards to mean "add that many stories to a chain." So when we played a 4 Etage card, we'd stack 4 new pieces on the board. This created some MAJOR towers - you couldn't see parts of the board anymore - and since the game ends when the last piece is played, some of our games were under 30 minutes! Interestingly, we still enjoyed it, though we all agree the correctly played game is MUCH better.
The tip off, by the way, was something I think Peter Sarrett posted. He was Mr. Big Boss Poster in those heady days (of a few years ago) and was always the first to answer questions about the game. He was, once again, explaining about how it's okay to start a company on, say, the 15 space if you also have the 16 card - the whole tricky "may not" v. "need not" bit of translation - and somewhere in the e-exchange, someone offhandedly mentioned running through the card deck and trying to balance your endgame building versus still being able to buy a card, and I thought...
Huh? How could you possibly get through the card deck? The game ends so quickly. We're lucky if we get through half the deck.
Bohnanza
Greg Aleknevicus
We missed the rule that you can't harvest a 1 bean field. Even after discovering this we continue to play it "wrong".
Craig Berg
More of an oversight than an error, really. Everyone always seems to forget about the "donation" rule. That is, until the first time someone uses it. Then, after the inevitable "Can you do that?", there is always a flurry of donations.
Greg Schloesser
For at least a dozen playings, we didn't know you could plant a second bean from your hand if you desired.
Doug Orleans
We played Bohnanza (the Rio Grande edition with all the extra beans) with 3 players, and played 3 rounds instead of 2 like it says. The game took almost 3 hours! Ugh!
Buried Treasure
Mark Jackson
It's not so much a 'lost' rule as it is a forgotten one... I always (and when I say "always", I mean *without* exception) forget that you can play cards you pick up on opponent's piles as well as your own.
Russ Williams
The first few times we didn't realize you kept your cards between rounds! That made the game worse, and not much point to the "steal 4" cards...
[Editor's note: this classic Sid Sackson design was most recently re-published as "Berried Treasure" from Restoration Games.]
Can't Stop
Mark Jackson
I was mortified to discover that I have been playing this wrong for nearly two years. Somehow, I missed the rule that you MUST place a white marker if you can. We played that you place a marker for both pairs on your first roll, then you must move OR place one marker per roll after that. (A fun game... but certainly NOT what Sid Sackson intended.) I was equally mortified to realize that changing to the correct rule did not keep my wife from clobbering me yet again... in our house, this game is know as "Can't Win" as she beats me 75% of the time!
Update: this only gets worse... now I discover that we've called you "bust" if you couldn't mark both pairs on the first roll - which isn't right either! You can mark only one if that's an option. Sheesh.
Canyon
Mark Jackson
I was shocked, nay, stunned, to find that I'd screwed up yet another rule (since this hardly ever happens... heh, heh, heh...). This time, it's the waterfall movement rule... we'd been playing that you moved as normal as long as you nailed your bid. We were surprised, nay, shocked to discover that you only get to move your bonus.
Carcassonne
Neil Carr
Played about a dozen games where you could place your meeple on ANY tile other than the one you PLAYED THAT ROUND. Still find those games to be more satisfying than the more "simplistic" way it is supposed to be played.
Cartagena
Jim Pulles
We also played Cartagena where each player only took one action per turn, instead of three. The game plays r-e-a-l s-l-o-w when you only get one card play per turn... it also gave most of us a bad first impression that's going to be hard to shake.
Clash of the Lightsabers
Matthew Baldwin & Mark Jackson
We hadn't seen/noticed/paid attention to the rule that being tied in points is broken by the number of cards, making standoffs less frequent. Well, we were the kings of standoff, if you get my drift.
Corsairs
Robert Rossney & Don Woods
From the "read carefully" department: these guys overlooked the rule that you remove 8-14 galleys from the deck (depending on the number of players) at the start of the game. In the words of Don, "It would still have a lot of luck, but the "painful and long" part would have been ameliorated."
Cosmic Encounter
Greg Aleknevicus
We played (and continue to do so) that you can attack ANYONE'S base on the system that you draw. Amazingly, while you'd think this would make the game last longer, our games are usually SHORTER than some of the times I've heard reported.
Dragon Delta
Joe Schlimgen, Richard Hutnik, Russ Williams, Richard Dewsbury, & a host of others...
In the first game of Dragon Delta, we were trying to figure out the starting villages for each player. THREE of us were looking at the color of the roofs, windows, lawn, etc., and couldn't for the life of us figure out any pattern that would work for all six colors. This probably went on for three or four minutes. Finally, I saw the coloredborder on the edge of the board and really felt like a fool.
Elfenland + Elfengold expansion
Derk Solko
We missed the whole bit about getting either your gold or two cards on a per TURN basis, instead of per city. If you think there needs to be a card limit with the correct way, try it this way...
En Garde
Derk Solko
What to do when the cards run out during a retreat. I didn't know that retreating was actually your turn, with the only thing you can do is move back a certain distance...
Entdecker
Doug Orleans
We played Die Neuen Entdecker assuming that you had to specify the direction of ship travel before you picked a tile; instead, you just pick a tile and place it in any legal spot next to your ship, which may end up moving your ship to somewhere you didn't want it to go. (I have no idea which version of this rule is in the old Entdecker.)
[Editor's note: It's the same in the original/better version of Entdecker.]
[Editor's note: It's the same in the original/better version of Entdecker.]
Joe Schlimgen
In the first two games, we played the scout acquired by the "Natives" event near the hut on the tile, not near the huts in the jungle.
Euphrat & Tigris
Derk Solko
During an external conflict in Red, the losing side doesn't lose every temple tile, just those not connected to leaders...
Richard Dewsberry
Our first game of Euphrat & Tigris was taking much longer than the stated 90 minutes. We knew the game was due to end when the bag ran out of tiles, but no matter how long we played, we didn't see the bag getting any lighter. Empires came and went, mighty civilisations fell in battle against other mighty civilisations, treasures were collected in abundance, but no end to the game. Then we realised that tiles taken out by conflict were discarded _from the game_, and should not have been returned to the bag as we were doing! Still, it made for the most fascinating game.
Mark Tyler
I recently got a call from my brother-in-law, Lee, regarding the proper way to play Euphrat & Tigris. Our phone conversation went something like this:
LEE: "The game was great fun until someone pointed out that the game can end in another way besides exhausting the tiles in the bag."
ME: "Yes, it can also end when there are only one or two treasures left on the board."
LEE: "Well, now all our games end in 15 minutes or less."
ME: "Hmm, I've never seen a game end in 15 minutes. Tell me how that is possible."
LEE: "Everyone immediately goes after the treasures until only two are left."
ME: "Okay, but that still takes longer than 15 minutes. It usually takes some time to connect the kingdoms so that the treasures can be taken."
LEE: "Connect the kingdoms? Don't you get a treasure by placing a leader next to a temple with a treasure?"
After learning that they collected treasures by placing a leader (and it didn't even have to be the green trader) next to a treasure spot, my only question for him was, "How did your games last as long as 15 minutes?"
Richard Hutnick
We had it so that leaders were NOT movable. That was yet another oops.
Expedition
Mark Jackson
I'm still not sure how it happened... but I've played Expedition (and taught it a number of people) while totally missing the rule that says you can only make one loop per expedition per turn. Man, can you *smoke* across the board with multiple loops... but sadly, no more.
Formula De
Greg Aleknevicus
Completely missed the rule that turn order is the same as race position. Caused so much trouble in the corners that I had to write up a whole set of special "swerving" rules to deal with it.
Mike Caprio
My friends and I had played Formula De a number of times before going to a tournament game when one of the new people we met there pointed out that on a roll of 20 on the 5th gear die or 30 on the 6th gear die means that *ALL* players in fifth or sixth gear must roll for engine damage. All of us thought previously that it was only the player who rolled the 20 or 30 who rolled for damage.
Needless to say, it added an entirely new dimension to the game. It became much more thrilling to see people on their last engine point praying desperately that they'll make the next lap without blowing up. Very Speed Racer. Now when making custom cars, we won't be skimping down to one engine point - or we'll at least think about it a little more.
Rick Jones
The Formula De rule mistranslation that screwed me up for a while was about having to stop on a straight between corners in order for your first stop in a corner to count. I now understand that you CAN go directly from one corner to the next without stopping in-between.
Fossil
Mark Jackson
The exchange by the finishing researcher MUST be accepted... we played the player could refuse.
Freight Train
Mark Jackson
I missed the rule about the first player "engine" switching... essentially skipping the first player each round. We just played that the first player was first player that whole round. (Much better game with the change!)
Get the Goods/Reibach & Co.
Tim Reddy
Until recently, we've played the 2X to double the number of cards played for a suit. For example, 3 oil cards along with a 2X card would be equivalent to 6 oil cards. The 2X card actually doubles the score obtained from the cards it is played on. So in the above example, if the oil card meld were the only oil card meld on the table and would normally garner 4 points, the 2X card increases the meld's value to 8.
Gnumies
Doug Orleans
We got *three* rules wrong in Gnumies:
1. The Copycastor (the wild card) goes to the low bidder, not the high bidder.
2. The Copycastor only copies your lowest scoring card, not just any card of your choice.
3. If you have 3 or more Walluhwakas (the bad dudes with the shovel), EACH ONE OF THEM makes you discard one card of your choice.
Hera & Zeus
RSTLoup
My girlfriend and I have just discovered that we've been making a huge error in playing Hera and Zeus.
I was explaining the rules to a friend last night and when we got to the Sirens card, I was elaborating a bit on how important it was, and he noted that it could only be used to retrieve a card with value 1 to 7, not a mythological card. I said, "What?" We have been allowing ourselves to use the Sirens to pick up ANY card -- and we've played a LOT of games.
Needless to say, many games have turned on this mistaken use of Sirens. Just imagine: You Sirens the other player's Hades, and then use it to retrieve your own Persephone. Getting to play both Persephones adds a lot of critical moves!
Another twist that would come up from time to time would be Sirensing the other player's Sirens, and then using that Sirens to get the newly exposed card underneath (foiling the strategy of covering a good card in the discard pile.)
Honeybears
Mark Jackson
I missed the rule about the player who moved the winning bear getting 6 points... which made the game much more of a "wait'n'see" snoozefest. Playing it with the right rules (finally!) took it off my trade pile and back into my "I Like Reiner" fan club!
Illuminati
Greg Aleknevicus
Actually we play this correctly but a VERY common oversight is that you can immediately transfer money to a newly acquired group from the controlling group as part of the "take-over". Also, lots of groups forget that play is COUNTER-clockwise around the table.
Iron Dragon
Joe Schlimgen
We played for YEARS being able to drop off multiple chips for a single demand (multiplying the demand by the number of chips). Great for cash flow, but simply wrong.
Java
Doug Orleans
We played Java without noticing the rule that you can't stand on top of a palace tile. We spend most of the game guarding palaces, only leaving them if we could return to them by the end of the turn. It was still an interesting game, but I imagine there's much more freedom when you aren't able to (and hence don't need to) guard the palaces like this.
Katzenjammer Blues
Mark Jackson
When a joker is turned over, each player gets a new card. (We've NEVER played with this rule... but it would certainly help the game)
[Editor's note: I have since played K. Blues with the correct rules - I was right. The game is much better. And it's recently been republished as "Cat Blues".]
Kill Dr. Lucky
Marianna
The game would not end... two hours (!) into it, my daughter showed up and pointed out that we were not discarding the failure cards separately but were recycling them back into the deck. We could have been there next week and still be playing! (Strangely, it was the best game of Kill Dr. Lucky we've ever played and the most hysterical we'e ever got.)
Lost Cities
Mark Jackson
The rules are play THEN draw, not draw then play. (It's interesting how something so simple changes a game so much.) Once again, my wife continues to beat on me even after the rule change. Sheesh.
Joe Schlimgen
The first game we played with a SINGLE discard pile that you couldn't draw from. Still good, but LOTS of luck. MUCH better the right way.
McMulti
Bob Rossney
We threw in the towel on our first game when the market crashed and gas prices went into a spiral from which they never recovered. Then it turned out there was a word missing from the English rules, which say that when economic conditions change, move the price of gas up a number of spaces equal to the number on the new economic conditions card. In fact, it's move it up a number of RED spaces. Very strange to play an economic game where *everyone* is going broke.
Metro/Iron Horse
Derk Solko
For the first several months we Metrogamers played this game, we didn't know this rule: the only valid placements for a tile is either against the outside of the surface or against a previously played tile.
Mark Jackson and others
Thanks to a less than stellar rules translation, many of us played that you MUST play the tile in your hand unless it was unplayable - then you could draw a replacement tile. In truth, the rule give you the choice of playing the tile in your hand or drawing and placing a different tile.
Meuterer
Mark Johnson
I would point out that I never really understood the rules clearly from a read of Adlung's traditionally horrible English translations. It wasn't until I played the game on BSW that the mechanics really clicked. Furthermore, about half the people that first played Meuterer with me on BSW had learned the game incorrectly. The errors I most often see are:
1. Thinking that the wares are sold at the port where the ship is, and the one where it goes on this turn. Makes sense, right? However, the wares are actually sold at the port where the ship is now, and where it was *last* turn. The destination port is determined through the play of the captain's (or mutineer's) ware cards--that is, the cards left in hand--but no wares are sold there until the following turn. (And the one after that.) Though a bit counter-intuitive, you get used to it, and it permits greater planning of accumulating and selling wares.
2. The determination of a majority at the "wild card" ports (Hochland and Piratennest). It's not that a majority in each type of ware is sold--it's that the ware with the single largest quantity is sold. Ugh, that's awkward, best shown by example. When at Hochland, John tries to sell 2 Cloth, Paul tries 2 Wine, George tries 1 Ruby, and Ringo tries 3 Cloth. Only Ringo will sell his wares for victory points. If Paul had tried to sell 3 Wine, he would've tied with Ringo and they both would sell for the lesser amount (unless one took the Handler).
[Editor's note: I tried valiantly to come up with a Beatles joke that referenced Meuterer... but I failed.]
Mexica
Jonathan Degann
We've played Mexica twice and only in the middle of our second game did we discover that you may not only move along the canals, but you may also move along the LAKE - the perimeter of the board - if canals flow into it. What a difference that would have made!
Modern Art
Chux
The 1st time that we played Modern Art everyone paid the bank for purchases that they had made. It wasn't until I read the rules again that I realised my mistake. Actually, it turns out that this is not a bad way to play when you have inexperienced players, as the only person who gets punished by rash overbidding is the overbidder... Strange thing, even though everyone agrees that the game can work this way, they prefer to play it the 'proper' way.
Money
Mark Jackson
We haven't let people bid "0", which is legal in the rules. As well, we've ended the hand when we can't fill both sets, although the rules say that's the beginning of the final round.
[Editor's note: Evidently, we - by which I mean ME - need to get our act together.]
Papua
Mark Jackson
A weak rules translation made the end game of this "run from the cannibals" game a crapshoot. We played that natives reaching the last totem could make a solo break for the beach (square spaces) and that any natives left by themselves on a jungle (circle) space were stuck until another party of natives showed up. The ACTUAL rules require that natives travel in groups until they BEGIN a turn on a beach (square) space.
Pepper
Greg Schloesser
For nearly a dozen or so playings I didn't know that the Pepper cards could be traded over and over again. This was mainly due to a poor rules translation. Most of my family still prefers to play this way!
Pig Pile
Greg Schloesser... sort of!
I, the Conductor, sat down to play Pig Pile at Gulf Games IX with Gail Schloesser, wife of the Nicest Guy on the Planet, Greg Schloesser. What I discovered was a Lost & Found entry of epic proportions. Greg had been taught and/or misread a number of rules - so, this one's for you, Greg. You CAN play multiple cards off your face-up slop piles (if they're identical)... and you CAN play more than 3 cards to wash the deck.
Princes of Florence/Die Fursten von Florenz
Rob Legood
I've now realized my group has been playing with a HUGE omission. When we counted the work value we did not count the number of personality cards in the hand -- we thought the points were only for personalities that had already completed a work. Whoops.
Quandary
Richard Hutnik
I remember getting Quandary, and thinking the rules said that you pick up the SAME COLOR scoring tile as the color of the number tile you put down. I played it once or twice and thought it was cute little, light weight game. When I figured out the real rule regarding this, the game took off.
Ra
Mark Jackson
The second time I played, I missed the "once around" bidding rule and allowed bidding to go around until someone was forced to drop out. Interestingly enough, the game still worked pretty well.
Samarkand
Mark Jackson
I didn't realize you shuffle the deck & discard pile every time a sale is made... whoops. BTW, the game works when you play it wrong, too.
Samurai
Derk Solko
Two majorities = insta-win...
Greg Aleknevicus
Missed the part about the game ending after the last of any one figure is collected.
Ian Borthwick & others
Living in the frozen north (Scotland) and not reading German at all, I am often amazed that I get anything right. The most noteable mistake came at Gulf Games 5 when I was in a game of Samurai, a game I had played many times before. I was a little confused as to the tactics that my opponents were using, but using a Samurai with a value of 7 I was able to pick up a town easily. This seemed to confuse my opponents who thought that someone else had won the town. So we all counted the tile values and when I said "seven" everyone else (including Jay Tummelson) said "one". We then had a debate over what the figure was. It appears that this was a European one, which as the only European at the table I hotly disputed.
Strangely enough playing this broken way the game works perfectly well, which is why it was such a shock that I was doing it wrong.
Settlers of Catan
Greg Schloesser, Craig Berg, Mark Jackson, Bill Nitsche...
For years we played that one had to trade FOR the commodity shown at the port by trading in other resources. (This seems to have been a VERY common error... I wonder if something in the first Mayfair edition rules caused this?)
K. Jeffrey
K. was very kind to let me post this one... he's been playing that no matter how many settlements you have adjacent to a hex, they only produce one resource. No big deal, right? Well, he's managed to win EVERY game he's played so far, so this "little" rules change may be his downfall! :-)
Erich Schneider
Among my local crowd of gamers, there is one who learned to play Settlers wrong (the other group he first tried it with thought you played with all resource cards exposed, rather than hidden). He taught the game to a whole bunch of people in this crowd (before I showed up), and of course they all played that way. Even though they've had the real rules shown to them now, they still prefer to play that way, and will discourse at length on how it makes the game so much better.
Settlers of Catan: Cities & Knights
Scott J Di Bartolo & Naz
Scott: The other mistake was not making all knights inactive after a barbarian attack (regardless of the outcome). This seemed logical enough, we just missed it in the rules. It makes the games longer as well and keeps wheat important throughout the game.
Naz: This sent me scrambling to the rulebook after seeing this one. Looks like our group was playing this wrong too. It makes much more sense this way as the knights just tend to sit around like decorations after the first barbarian attack. LoL. Thanks for posting about this gaffe.
Settlers of Catan Cardgame
Errol Elumir
Somehow missed the rule that you're required to have the most windmills AND a city to get the windmill token. (Heck of a lot easier when you don't need the darn city.)
Judson Cohan & Mark Jackson [though I figured it out a little quicker than Judson]
For our first 25 games of the Settlers card game, we didn't realize that yellow cards are removed from the game when played.
Shark
Richard Hutnick
I assumed that the rules allowed a player only 5 transactions TOTAL during their turn, this included selling. This meant a player could only sell up to 5 shares in a turn. Since we played two players, we didn't notice. This variant does work well for a 2 player game of Shark.
Showmanager
Derk Solko
I totally missed the 'you can't take loans out on a show that all players have produced' rule the first time or two...
Craig Berg
We didn't realize that actors were removed from the game once they had been in a production. We put them into the discard pile and, when the deck ran out reshuffled it. Created some pretty high scores since all those '9's came back into play.
Spacebeans
Kevin Maroney, Russ Williams, Huw Morris, & a host of others...
A close reading of the rules indicates that we were doing something wrong: The cards get passed to the *right*, but the turn rotates to the *left*. We had both rotating to the left. Anthony Rubbo's otherwise excellent rules translation omits the text formatting from the original, in which "right" and "left" were both emphasized.
Stratego
Matthew Baldwin
Steve: He always thought the Bombs were gone when they were hit. We got the rules out and I showed him he was wrong.
Matthew: The bombs aren't removed when they get hit? Whaaaa-?
---Matthew checks Stratego rules online---
Matthew: Holy Moly!
Steve: Only by a Miner (8). Then the bomb goes but the Miner stays. Otherwise the bomb stays and the attacking piece is destroyed.
Taj Mahal
Jim Pulles
We recently had a game of Taj Mahal in which two us had to be corrected on the rules... and both rules were different. I had always played that the white special cards were discarded after use, and not kept in hand. Another player had never scored for palace chains on a player's turn but instead waited and scored them at the end of the game.
Tikal
Derk Solko
I completely muffed the scoring round the first time through. I simply interpreted it as an El Grande type thing where we just scored all positions and continued.
Titan
Dave Kohr
For 10 years we played Titan wrong, by permitting you to recruit the weakest creature available in a given terain type without requiring that you already have a creature of that type. Ten years of Titan, down the drain!
Don Woods
Well, this one isn't mine, but a friend's. (No, really!) This friend always did terribly at Titan. One day we discovered that at least part of the reason was that he had misunderstood the rule about not moving stacks through other players' stacks on the masterboard. He thought he was also prohibited from moving through his OWN stacks.
Gilbert Benoît
In university, I was taught to play Titan by a friend, who badly misinterpreted the way battles work. The way we played was:
- attacker moves
- defender moves
- strike phase (i.e. one strike phase per battle round instead of two).
Needless to say, this made battles very static, and the attacker was always under pressure from the strong possibility of a time loss.
Even after I had bought the game for myself, I still played that way (the fact that the rules mention a "common" strike phase re-inforced my mistake). One day, two friends of mine, Denis and François, were supposed to come over to my house for a game. As I spoke with Denis on the telephone to confirm that they were coming, he mentioned that François had read the rules, and that he thought that we had been playing wrong all along. I was very dimissive ("no way, he does not know what he is talking about, etc..."). Now, even when biased, I am still fair minded; I thought I would re-read the rules, so I could point out to François exactly what his mistake was. However, reading the rules in this new light, it became obvious that he was right, so when they rang my door bell, I was wearing a paper bag over my head, and I had written "François is right" on it... Was that ever embarassing!
Alan Kwan
Most new groups I get to play Titan with, they play some major rules wrong. And reportedly they have been playing that way (such as /years/) for a long time.
The other day, a group played that the attacker can summon an Angel only if he slays a defending unit in the first battle turn, and that carry-overs have to be predesignated and can only be applied to a target adjacent to the first target.
Torres
Thorbjörn Engdahl
For a very long time we played that if you entered a door with your knight, you could exit through any door, not only those on the same level or lower. The action card that allowed the same move was considered rather lame..
Union Pacific
Greg Schloesser & Don Woods
I still keep forgetting the rule wherein players play one share of stock at the beginning of the game.
Vino
Eric Amick (although we played it wrong, too!)
When we first played Vino, we had players lose 'grapes' from their cellars equal to the number of bottles sold. The game lasted MUCH longer than it's suggested 60-90 minutes. Turns out we were not reading the rules carefully enough. Here's the relevant section:
Losing vineyards
When a player sells wine, he must return vineyards to the bank based on the amount of wine he sold. To find the number, the player looks in the column with the number sold to the row labeled ""lost vineyards" ".. . . After he picks up the chips [on the returned vineyards], he adjusts his wine cellar for that variety, subtracting the number *returned* [emphasis mine].
Wettstreit der Baumeister
Greg Schloesser
Since acquiring the game when it was first released, we have always played that a player MUST complete a town in order to generate a score. That means a player's town must contain at least a town hall and two end towers. If a town was missing one of these components, then the player would not score any points and, thus, could not win.
However, it was pointed out to me after a recent session report that this was incorrect. In reality, the only penalty a player suffers if he does not build a complete town is that he is ineligible for any of the scoring bonuses. He still receives points for each piece he has in his town. Ahem.
You know, I kinda like it the way we used to play. This made acquiring a town hall and end towers vital, and it was neat to see the desperation setting in on those players who had not yet acquired a vital piece as the game approached an end. Further, this made the use of the saboteurs much more powerful, as a player could target one of these vital pieces late in the game, often extorting huge bribes from the intended victim (we use the saboteur variant as published on the Westbank Gamers site). I think we'll continue to play our former (incorrect) version in future playings.
Wyatt Earp
Richard Borg (via Scott Alan Woodard)
Photo cards may be played out-of-turn if a set is melded by ANOTHER player and you posess the matching Photo card. According to the Rio Grande rules, use of a Photo card may only take place on your own turn and counts as a Sheriff card. Playing so that Photo cards may be played out-of-turn works much better, in my opinion. <I>(Conductor's Note: This is the way Richard taught us to play in March 2001... and I'm with Scott - I think it works better.)
According to Jay Tummelson, the head of Rio Grande Games, both Richard Borg and Mike Fitzgerald approved the English version of the rules before they were published - not including the Photo card rule. "You are welcome to play that way, but it is not in the rules," says Jay. Stefan Bruck of Alea, the German publisher, agrees with Jay... and suggests, "If somebody wants to keep on playing with the 'photo op' rule they should decrease at least the 4 sheriff-points down to 3."
Jim Pulles & others
We played you can never play more than one sheriff card on a turn, even though the rules explicitly state that you can play two if one is retrieved from the discard pile (with a Wyatt Earp sheriff card).
Zirkus Flohcati
Mark Jackson
It's easy to miss (for me at least) that when a player turns up a matching card to the table, not only is his turn over BUT the card that was just drawn is discarded.
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In the words of Derk Solko:
"All of this really makes me wonder if I should ever be put in charge of reading rules, no?"
I'd like to think that the reason this list is so freakin' long is because I'm quite often the person that does the rules reading, so an unhealthy portion of the errors would happen to me. But I don't know that that's necessarily true...
