Top 10 Good Games with One Annoying Rule 

Next list: terrible games with one really cool idea.

Zee’s #10 was changed in the 2nd edition of King of Tokyo. The first player enters Tokyo at the end of their turn regardless of what they have rolled. The first player’s claws still won’t resolve, however there’s no more turtling to avoid entering Tokyo.

The comedy and chemistry in this top ten is great! This is why I watch the Dice Tower 👏

My house rule is Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle...The Hogwarts deck is MASSIVE (even without expansions). What can happen is the 6 cards you choose from are all too expensive, so all the players pass on their buy action every turn, the game grinds to a halt and you can't deckbuild in a deckbuilding game! We have 2 Hogwarts decks, one deck with cards that cost 1-4 and a second deck with cards that cost 5+. 4/6 spots you can buy cards from are from the cheap deck (and replenish from that deck as you buy cards), 2/6 spots are from the expensive deck. This doesn't make the game easier, it makes an occasionally broken game into a GAME.

I think the best house-rule to avoid the awkward position of no one starting in Tokyo in King of Tokyo (Zee's #10 pick) is to have the last player start in Tokyo. It gets rid of the problem trying to avoid claws in your first turn and it gives the last player something to do while waiting for everyone else to do their turns (do they want to get out of Tokyo or not). I even give them the point for starting in Tokyo.

When my family plays Lords of Waterdeep we don't like that only one player per round can go to Builders Hall -- we understand that it's meant to be a limit and incentivize people going to Castle Waterdeep but we find the game to be much more interesting when more buildings can be obtained each round, so we have a house rule that Builders Hall has 3 slots, one corresponding to each building on sale. We find that there's still some incentive to go first in the round since some buildings are more advantageous to own than others, and also allows the options on the board to expand more considerably each round. There might be reasons why this was limited in the official rules but we find it more fun this way.

Every time the subject of "semi"co-op hate comes up on this channel it really makes me wish New Angeles had gotten more exposure when it was new. Greedy corporations trying to get one over on each other, while also working together to keep the city from falling into chaos. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the Netrunner/cyberpunk setting, but I just love that game.

Have you ever done a Top 10 Games You Would Not Play Without An Expansion? I could find a top 10 best expansions in 2012, but that was as close as I could find (I may be blind, mind you, at my age, but.... :-)

On Gloomhaven JOTL my wife and I had burned out because of how much angst we had around the communication, but i hadn't figured out that was the issue until Mike said it just now. We are immediately house ruling that and i think it will make the game so much better.

@Zee RE: King of Tokyo, second edition fixed the claw to enter Tokyo rule. If Tokyo is empty on your turn, you go into Tokyo. So basically the first player will enter Tokyo on their turn.

Really appreciate you guys sharing your house rules and fixes for these problematic games. I like a lot of the games on this list and also tend to do house rules, getting more ideas for them is fun

@Mike - Yes, the monster "dice loss" is an essential part of the dice economy. Losing your dice to the monster fight has been the most contentious mechanics in the game. Glad to hear that the game is still on the positive side for you. Either way, thanks for mentioning us!

"I One-der if I can help." 😁 In Carcassonne, I play with each player having 2 tiles and drawing one after playing one. This way there's always a choice between 2 tiles to play except the last round. I worry 3 tiles draw may slow it down too much. I will definitelyimplement the Takenoko variant of not eating the last bamboo stalk. I also like the variant rule of each set of objective gives you extra points which encourages some balance.

This is the funniest Top 10 from Dice Tower I've seen. I've never laughed so much. It would be interesting to have an episode that lists your houserules.

Kudos for whoever made the transition animations, very well done! :)

My most annoying rule, nectar in wingspan Oceania. As it is a wild resource it becomes the only resource and makes the game too simple, removing the difficult in feeding birds to play them. I have house ruled that only 3 of the nectar dice are used and 2 base game dice are used.

My house rule for Marvel Legendary: the person with the highest points decides which hero gets a ticker tape parade for saving the day.

I think Castles of Caladale has the same problem that Zee's number 1. Rearranging the whole castle to fit in one tile can take forever. And there is always some way if you think long enough. Great video guys, it was a lot of fun!

When I was starting out in the hobby with my copy of pandemic, I definitely alpha gamed. I look back and I'm like "I don't think this was actually fun for anyone else". I've gotten much better now 😅

Agree with Mike. Pandemic open hands should be the only way. Gloomhaven same way. Limited communication is the worst mechanism. It is almost always solved via meta-communication, which is not fun.

Great list! Neom is great indeed. The designer posted a no disaster variant, as well as a "timed disaster hitting everyone" variant that we use... So no one drafts it, but everyone still needs to build knowing they'll come, which keeps the fire and police station tiles valuable.

This is my favourite top 10 yet! As someone who enjoys game design/casually designing games I found this an interesting look at game design errors and/or pitfalls to avoid putting in games.

For me it's Zombicide where one rule stipulates that you have to add in zombies if there is an even amount of noise between two players; basically if it's tied. So if a zombie had the same line of sight on both players as well as both players having the same amount of noise, you'd double the amount of zombies so that there would be the same number going for each player. This should have been done using a die to decide between which player the zombie(s) would head toward, but they opted this nonsensical rule instead.

We have always played KoT with each person rolling the dies. The one with the most smashes starts in Tokyo. Just makes sense. We like the power cards, but few get into play... so we give double energy cubes per energy die roll. Works for us.

Here's mine, and I house rule it into something that really elevates the game IMO. Tsuro. The rule is if your dragon pawn collides with another, you are both out of the game. I think that destroys a great opportunity for player interaction, so instead we have the assassination rule. If you place a tile that brings you into contact with an opponent, your opponent is eliminated - not you. And (because if you were to follow the opponents path it would just take you to the edge of the board and kill you anyway) from there you may pick any other available path on that tile to follow on your next turn. Play continues as normal from there.

13:50 - Zee must have had a different Via Magica rule book than I did because mine clearly said in case of ties, the first player or the person who shouted that is closest to the left of the first player goes first on clearing the cards; no silly numbers needed. What I actually miss from Rise of Augustus is the cards that attack your opponents when you clear them (removes tokens from spaces they have covered, so they have to get them covered again).

The mandatory quests in LoW can help balance with 3+ players. But in a 2 player game, there’s really no choice and it drags each other down. I totally agree with taking them out, especially with 2. Good call!!

Honestly ankh merge rule is one of the best components. The common theme for people who dont like it are people who dont like giving losing players a second chance or those who dont like working with their friends

In Dominion, the supply of provinces are evenly divisible by the number of players at all player counts, the first player advantage mostly comes from attack cards, or getting a free 'dead turn' in an otherwise close game. (the 'last player wins ties' is meant to mitigate this). I'm a bit surprised anyone finds the game ending condition annoying. Planning and timing the end of the game has always felt like... "the game" to me. Taking the second to last province is a statement of intent. If you're concerned about a small first player advantage for a single game of Dominion, I can't imagine an equal-turns variant doing anything but generating a significant last-mover advantage instead, so it's not really solving any kind of balance problem. Beyond all that - it's just fun to have some anxiety about that dwindling pile of provinces!

"Very clever but not a lot of fun", well put Mike, to me this actually sums up the latest Lang designs (including Blood Rage) :p

This is a great video. Great, unique topic that can bring older or less talked-about games to the forefront. Such funny banter, too. I was laughing half of the video. Dominion is my all-time fave, so I love any time it gets mentioned (usually by Tom. Keep reppin', Tom!). In the early days of playing Dominion, I thought the same thing about the equal turns thing. But I've tried it the other way, and it absolutely breaks the game and the way it feels, especially in two-player games. The way the rules are set are the best way to play. Something that is done in other games (even Donald X. did it in Temporum) is giving something to Player 2, a little more to Player 3, etc. I don't know how they could implement something like that in Dominion without changing it too much, but I'd rather see something like that than giving equal turns. I played Takenoko for the first time recently, and I hated that irrigation rule, too, Mike. It's frustrating to remember it, not to mention remembering that you can't put certain things on some of the tiles based on the symbols. Ugh. Still, a great game. Also, Zee is awesome (they all are, of course). The Mansions (I hate minis in general, so I appreciated it) and Witch of Salem convos were hilarious.

One of the most entertaining episodes while plenty of gaming information that helps rationalizing the enjoyment factor on some of these games. Bad rules/mechanics are game killers.

This was a really good top 10!

In Quacks of Quedlinberg when the person who gets furthest gets to roll the bonus die. To me, it's just a "rich get richer" rule that keeps rewarding the person who is already ahead. I get that the rat tails help people catch up, but rewarding the leader as well just counteracts them most of the time.

I always play Carcassonne by the actual rules, the "slowing" of the game is not really a thing as the board changes on each turn anyway. also, I play the 2 discard pile in Sheriff of Nottingham with my niece and nephew who are 7 and 9 and it doesn't confuse them so at no time would I have thought that it was a confusing rule that would need to be changed. they actually like getting the extra choices.

King of Tokyo: Dark Edition - House rule we use for first person to get into Tokyo, they do get to attack, but because its the first entrance into Tokyo, we remove 1 claw from their roll as a "destroy the military" penalty. There are also ways to force Tokyo to empty in Dark Edition, meaning you can use this rule again at other points to explain why you do less damage, but still can want high-claw rolls entering Tokyo

I do like they added some characters that use those points to deal damage in Legendary, which I liked because we also don't use that rule, but it gave the points a reason for us, assuming they play that character. Love the list.

I felt like such a dork nodding away to the in-depth discussion/debate about Takenoko :-D

I know this came out two years ago, but Mike really missed the mark with wingspan. The feeder re-roll rule is essential. Otherwise it can get plugged up forever with rats and fish or stuff nobody wants. 😎

The "fix" for Takenoko, that says you can't eat the last bamboo shoot isn't balanced, because an upgrade can't be added to a plot that has bamboo... so if you don't place the plot such that it is NOT irrigated (since if it is, it automatically grows), you can never place an upgrade on it. Not only is this problematic for accomplishing some goals, it makes "taking an upgrade" an almost wasted action.

I didn't know this until the other day when I read it on a Facebook group, but apparently in Memoir 44 mountains can't see over hills because they are different terrain levels. Surely every mountain would be taller than a hill but that rule does exist. Great vid 👍

I just rebased the MoM minis with smaller translucent bases and I keep the tokens by the side of the board. Best of both worlds; get the presence of the minis on the board (the minis in the base game are a bit rough to be sure as they reused the same sculpts from v1 but the expansion ones are as good as normal FFG quality) and having the tokens to the side means they can be referred to easier than if they were on the board.

what a fun list ;) I had such a great time watching this ;))

I feel the same way about World's Fair 1893 that Tom does about Dominion - everyone should get the same number of turns. I feel like there is a slight first player advantage in that game. I think the starting variations (of where you put your supporters) are supposed to compensate for that, but I'm not convinced that it's balanced. - - I agree with Tom about the Carcassonne tile draw too. We always draw two tiles and let the player choose which one they want to play so there's more decision-making in the game. - - Never thought about the Sherrif of Nottingham discard pile thing, but now that you bring it up, I totally agree! - - Great video!

We like Carcassonne! In this game we have a houserule to compensate for the luck factor of the hidden draw: Each player gets ONE monastery, so firstly each player has the chance to get these 9 points at least once - and secondly and most importantly, *you always have 2 parts in your hand from which you can can choose!* Once you have placed the monastery, you have always another tile in your hand because you always draw a new one.

100% Agree with Zee on the Carcassonne rule. Draw at the start of your turn, it helps everyone focus on the game instead of sitting there doing your own thing. We play that when you draw a tile you put it down on the table so everyone can see then there is a lot of interaction with everyone making suggestions trying to influence the game in their favour, or for new players it makes it easier to just point out the options for them.

I looove farmers in Carcassonne. Connecting fields and outsmarting another farmer player is the most fun in Carcassonne for me :)

I like this one, because from a design perspective, it makes you think about individual rules and whether they should exist.

Gloomhaven has a rule written in the rulebook for open communication if you only crank up the trap and monsters by one level, which you also use for solo.

Mice and Mystics - Rule I hate (that ruined the game for me): When enemy make rolls, there is a 1 in 6 chance per die rolled to add a cheese to the Cheese Wheel. The cheese wheel can make the game end quicker. So regardless of your strategy, if a bunch of enemies roll cheese during their action, the game can suddenly become impossible to win because you're out of time.

In Takenoko we have a house rule where if you “roll” rain on the dice we also have the option where you can put a channel in and irrigate a plot of land. It makes sense and opens up the plot objectives more.

Re-basing Mansions of Madness' minis to clear bases is a must.

Tiny Epic Pirates, whoever buries 3 treasures wins (and there is tirbreaker criteria). But there's so much more to the game than just burying treasure, it feels like the most boring win condition. So I came up with a VP scoring variant that essentially rewards being the best pirate, not just the richest one.

I knew Ankh would be on here! I am playing it in a couple weeks, and we're going to try to use the merge rule. I think approached with the right attitude, we'll appreciate it, but we'll see. Maybe we'll hate it

@Zee I sold all of my minis in Mansions in bulk and kept all the cardboard chits. Saved so much room.

24:37 When playing solo gloomhaven you're supposed to increase the difficulty because knowing the exact initiative of both characters helps.

LOL. I do remember my first time playing Legendary with my gaming group. We played once, and we are all like "what? so we win together but we don't win together?", literally the next 3 games we ended up playing fully cooperatively not caring about that idiotic rule. BAM, game fixed.

Totally agree with Lords of Waterdeep mandatory quests. Especially when you don't even want to play them, but you have them and you want to play any intrigue card. But we hate removing all cards that reference them. So our house rule is if you draw any card dealing with mandatory quests, you have the option to discard it and draw a different card. That way you can still play them if you need/want to (e.g., runaway leader, etc.).

Love the game Abyss. Also like abyss conspiracy. However, both have 1 location that says search the entire stack and pick one. This just takes too long and is awful when a first time player gets this. I remove this location from both versions.

I play Gloomhaven at 3 and I kind of like the limited communication rule just because it makes things feel a bit more thematic to me and removes some table captain problems slightly, but I can understand why it would bother someone else.

Dominion's end ruling is only used for determining tiebreakers. Even so, sometimes, ties still happen.

Does Roy get credit for those awesome intro sequences? I'm always laughing out loud!

This was a really fun top 10!

I understand the hate for the Shadows Over Camelot rule but A) its fun to roleplay and B) it helps the traitor hide/solves alpha gaming a bit (the traitor is at a disadvantage in this game). If it was open communication I think it would be impossible to hide as the traitor, and if there was zero communication I think it would be too hard to make progress - but I haven't tried either way so I can't say for sure.

Mandatory quests in Lords of Waterdeep - you can play with a rule where every player can only be given one per game

Along the lines of the Castle Panic superior murderer rule is the scoring mechanism in LotR: The Dice Building Game where the winner with the highest Glory wins. To keep a Glory advantage, a player has to occasionally screw over everybody else by not stopping corruption, which could lead to everyone losing.

In Takenoko, I never had trouble figuring out which tiles were irrigated, or things like that. Winning with the plot deck was always way too easy for me.

Tales of the Arabian Nights. The day/evening/night tokens are only activated when the deck runs out, only the deck hardly runs out during a game so you're left with not seeing two thirds of the game (evening and night phases). There have been some house-rules for this to get to the evening and night phases quicker, but there really needs to be an official variant.

I think the Gloomhaven rule exists to prevent alpha gaming. Last night my gf played a card to go earlier then me which resulted in me not being able to use my top action. If I had perfect information I would have told her not to. However we have more fun not micromanaging what each of us does. Is it harder and weird? Yes, but it improves our experience a lot.

I think the gloomhaven communication rule is there to stop 1 player from being able to be "the general"

Here's the reason for Dominion's end condition. There are two ways for the game to end: (1) province deck is emptied, (2) three piles are emptied. In (1), giving the additional turns to even them out is unlikely to make a difference, as you won't be able to buy a province. In (2), the game has likely been quite long (at least 30 cards have to be gained to get to this point) to reach this end condition, giving ample time to balance things out. If you haven't caught up by this point, it's unlikely one additional turn will help you. I believe this makes enough reason not to have to keep track of the first player. It's more exciting if the game could end suddenly at any moment. The REAL rule that Dominion messed up is shuffling starting decks. The fact that some people luck into a 5/2 start while others get 4/3 is a needless imbalance. We house rule it so that everyone can stack their deck on the first shuffle, which makes it fairer. Plus, it makes an interesting choice to start the game.

Great list! I love these slightly negative lists. Would have been good of they’d each limited themselves to mentioning the limited communication thing just once on their list

This was probably my favorite of all the top 10's you all have ever done.

Legendary semi-coop is the game that instantly came to mind, it’s my favorite solo game but it has a couple of odd rules. - Playing fully cooperative is definitely the way to go. - Another bit from Legendary I didn’t like is how Villains has all different keyword terminology for the same concepts (e.g. you recruit “allies” from the “lair” in Villains and recruit “heroes” from the “HQ” in the base game. But mechanically they’re completely identical.) - Letting villains escape often has no negative consequence, and even is strategically useful since you get to pick the card that is KO’d when it happens. I always house rule that when a villain escapes they KO a random card that costs 6 or less. It feels more thematic and raises the stakes slightly on enemies escaping. It’s also tweaks the difficulty up just a touch which I don’t mind either.

Do the "Top 10 games that are fun even though you know you are losing"!

Zee, my group hates those miniatures from Mansions just as much. We do the same thing you do. The minis are also so insanely huge. They're the worst.

I'm always hesitant to house-rule something - mostly because it might throw the balance of a game. But house rules and their discussion in forums like BGG have made great impact in the industry, getting integrated (or changed) in expansions and 2nd(+) editions of games. Great Top10!

"We are all blue!" Tom says wearing teal. And this, developers, is why we need colourblind consideration in board games ;)

The wingspan food die rule is one of my favorite rules in the game!

Theres a marker for the activr player in Wildlands. If the active player is interupted, and then the player who interupted gets interupted, after the actions of the second interupter, it goes back to being the active player'a turn. It doesnt cycle back through. Also, if you get in a rythm, its easy to do the interrupt without affecting the flow of the game.

I actually love Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails, and I think you get to look at your tickets/routes before you pick your mixture of trains and boats

Loot rule in Gloomhaven. It doesn't make sense that can't pick up loot, chests, coins after combat is over. Most of the time it probably makes sense to allow that (unless the scenario is about quick in/quick out).

Hi, great top 10! the Witch of Salem is a good one, its really annoying and not thematic. BTW if I had a dollar for every time I hear reviewers say the rules for game X are terrible or this game has the worst rulebook in the world I would be rich, so it would be great to have a top 5 or top 10 list of rules mistakes (or what ever are the reasons why all those games are said to have bad/confusing rule books) that would be both useful and entertaining! Thanks!

‘I’m hoarding all the cans of food’ Zee is still mad about Dead of Winter

Totally agree with Zee on Mansions of Madness. I tried the regular black bases and hated them. I re-based all the monsters with a clear base and put the markers beside them on the board and it was too messy. Now I just put the monster token in a stand and it’s perfect for me. This is one of those times where the more they overcomplicated the plumbing the easier it was to stop up the drain. Simple is the way to go IMO. 😁

I totally agree with Zee about playing pandemic with hidden hands. There will always be someone who knows pandemic more, is louder, etc. Especially since it’s a popular entry game; new people don’t really understand the issue with alpha gaming yet. I’ve checked-out of several pandemic games when playing open handed because there’s just no point in playing. It’s suuuuch a boring experience when that happens, for everyone involved. I actually prefer playing with the rule that you can’t tell people the cards you have, but you can point out things that need to be dealt with. Whether someone uses their cards to deal with that issue is up to them.

I don’t think I ever read that rule for castle panic! Honest I must have blocked it from my mind. 😂

As someone else said in comments, Gloomhaven's rulebook state that if you play 2 characters alone you are meant to increase difficulty by 1. The whole thing of the communication aspect is meant to simulate the chaos of battle plus how well your characters (and yourselves) know each other; and I must say we respected the rule but didn't think it would play like that, but it did: in the beginning we were pretty sloppy, sometimes moving an enemy away from one another... by game 10 or something, just from the board state we were more ofter than not comboing avenger-style without the need to say much, because we know what everyone else could do

The communication issue on Gloomhaven is thematic when I think about it. In Gloomhaven, you are a party of mercenaries that are constantly changing members/characters so in a sense, you don't know each other at the start of your partnership. You are in the party for your own personal goals and you don't know the other characters yet. As time goes by, and you see your abilities and capabilities, you get to know your fellow party members. And THAT is where you get to the point that you know your other party members' initiative value. It's because you already spent enough time together in the party that you got to know each other.

So agree with Waterdeep: If it's close to the end of the game and you really need to complete that last big quest you are working on to have a chance to win, but then someone pushes that mandatory quest on you and you can't do your last quest because of that... It's just annoying and I wouldn't want other people to feel they didn't win just because of that either. Neither do I want to win that way. I very rarely houserule things either, but that is one of those cases (Like in Neom too, just use the variant the designer proposes on BGG)

wrt Ankh: Gods of Egypt. Clearly the Merge appeared to have been a challenge for the CMON Development team as well. Just read Update #57 of the campaign on Kickstarter and you’ll understand the considerations they had to go through, to keep this aspect of the game as originally intended/designed by Eric Lang. To that extend Kudos to the CMON design team for their resilience in picking up the challenge. Anyway, looking fwd receiving my copy of the game and giving it my consideration after playing it. A’nekh djet!

The first claw should put you in Tokyo and the remainder should do damage when nobody is in Tokyo IMO.

My absolutely most hated rule in a game is a rule of omission from Dungeons & Dragons: The Legend of Drizzt Board Game where there are purposely no LoS rules. According to the dev attacks can curve around corners without the need for the attacker to actually be able to see the target. He did it to keep the game simple and fast moving, but in that case don't even bother with a map and minis, and just turn it into a card game. This is such an immersion breaking rule that I can't stand to play the game without house ruling in a LoS mechanism.

Wingspan...I think it's fine on the bird feeder. It's really simple - you always have a choice of which die to take. If there is no choice, you reroll....It has never felt clunky to me personally. Not disagreeing that this should be on THEIR list because different things bug different people (which is why Mike said this would be a controversial list to begin with). It's just something I never considered being clunky myself because it makes so much sense from a game mechanic that it needs to reroll to give a choice. I guess if you view games thematically instead of just "as a game", I can see it.

I just can't get into Gloomhaven, as much as I want to and as awesome of a concept as it is, because of "burning" cards; I get that it's a resource management mechanic, and maybe I just don't understand it as well as I'd like to think I do, but it always feels to me like there's no way to actually complete a scenario with as many cards as you're expected to burn

For me, it’s the blue “X” (miss) die face in Descent 2e. Love the game, but that miss comes up more often than is necessary and it really marrs the game.

I really enjoyed this list

I agree with so many choices! But when it comes to you'r bluffin, the two animal shorter variant is in my rulebook! And I think I never played without actually...

I love the end conditions for Dominion and the fact there is no poor man round is amazing thing, I just wonder why three stacks must be gone, not two, probably games used to be longer back in the day

My list is really small: 1) Fantastic Factories - I've only played this game with 2 people and we did not want to follow the rule where we both do the work phase at the same time. We went one at a time so we could watch the other play. 2) Forbidden Desert - You can only get water from a well once. I get that it's trying to make the game harder to survive, but from a realistic standpoint a well isn't going to dry up because a few people filled up their canteens once.