More and more often we’ve been discovering that we’ve been playing some of our games wrong.
Well, maybe not wrong, but it seems like some rules somehow slip by us. Sometimes we purposely ignore certain rules. With co-op games, we always play with our cards face up on the table. It just makes it easier to strategize. Other times it’s just that we messed up.
Some of our mistakes we discovered because of a BoardGameGeek thread. Others were discovered after rereading the rules again.
With 7 Wonders, we didn’t realize you couldn’t play multiple copies of the same card. No one ever questioned it, so we never looked at the rules for clarification.
We played Lords of Waterdeep several times before we discovered the advantage to sending an agent to Waterdeep Harbor. We hardly played any Intrigue cards because we thought it was a waste of an agent. Then we discovered that you get to reassign your agent, which basically means you get an extra action.
It was only with the Engines of War expansion for Castle Panic that we realized we’d been playing that wrong ever since the Wizard’s Tower expansion. We thought you could draw a mix of cards from the regular deck and wizard deck. In actuality you can only draw from the wizard deck when you discard a card or another card says you can.
The first two times we played Terraforming Mars we really messed it up. The first time we forgot to remove the corporation era cards until mid-game, and we didn’t start ourselves with any resource production. The second time, we didn’t remove the corporation era corporation cards which really messed up my game. My “advantage” of a discount on Earth cards wasn’t useful at all (since the bulk of those cards exist within the corporation era cards). We also thought that you could play a card that required you to lose production (-1 energy production for example) even if you didn’t have it to lose. You can only play those cards if you can actually lower your production.
We played Kooky Kalooki so many times before we discovered two things:
- When you call a card, you also have to draw from the top card of the deck (adding 2 extra cards to your hand)
- The game ends when you reach a certain number of points, not when someone completes the final goal requirements
I’m sure there are many more rules we’ve accidentally overlooked over the years. It’ll be interesting to see how our gameplay changes.