How often do you tweak your game?

[jguritza]

A game has a flaw or weakness that you exploit with experience, do you tweak the game? Do you have a favorite game that you tweak to give it a shot in the arm needed for a new experience?

What tweaks and variants do you apply to your games?

 

[Patrick Carroll]

Hmm . . . that's kinda personal, isn't it?

 

[Overseer]

Originally posted by Patrick Carroll
Hmm . . . that's kinda personal, isn't it?

:laugh: What, you don't want to share your tweaking experiences?

 

[jguritza]

Originally posted by Patrick Carroll
Hmm . . . that's kinda personal, isn't it?

Wow getting into the personal side of Patrick?

:laugh:

 

[Tom DeFranco]

I tweak next to nothing. The only thing I tweak is Landships, and not by grafting my rules, but by incorporating some of the advanced rules to the intro scenario.

 

[Pete G]

I end up mucking around very little primarily because if I find a game lacking or "failed" in some regard I generally move on to another title. Like Tom, if I do anything, I tend to weave in a handful of optional or advanced rules as to create the sort of experience and complexity I'm after. There are instances where I will disregard or alter certain CRT modifiers if I feel they run counter to my feelings as to how a situation or circumstance should be modeled, but that's an exceptionally rare occurance.

Games where I've been able to pick and choose from a set of optional and advanced rules include AH's Submarine and the blessed gaming experience that is Strat-o-Matic Baseball.

Overall, I appreciate designers who recognize that players of their systems may desire varying degrees of granularity and give players the latitude to customize their experience to suit.

-Pete

 

[Patrick Carroll]

Tweaking guilt

I've occasionally tinkered with wargame rules. But after "improving" the game, I find it somehow unsettling to use my own house rules.

I guess the thing is, when I buy a wargame I feel I'm buying into a slice of the whole wargaming hobby. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people are playing the same game. And if I start playing it differently than everybody else, I'm on the fringes of the group.

Ironically, I play mostly solitaire anyhow, so it shouldn't matter. But even when I'm playing a solo wargame, I feel I'm practicing for the two-player game I'll play someday. And when that day comes, I don't want to have the rules wrong. In fact, my whole excuse for solitaire is that I'm just playtesting the game--learning the rules and getting the hang of the game system.

 

[Mike Duffy]

Originally posted by jguritza
A game has a flaw or weakness that you exploit with experience, do you tweak the game? Do you have a favorite game that you tweak to give it a shot in the arm needed for a new experience?

What tweaks and variants do you apply to your games?

I tweak, therefore I am.

I love to tweak, adding extra rules, scenarios, & sometimes counters. Usually all this effort results in nothing, but sometimes it makes the game a little more fun &/or realistic.

Take, for example, The Gamers' Leros, a great game, by any standards. I added rules prohibiting the Germans from landing paratroopers on mountains and using the harbors on the first days (they were all heavily mined by the Italians).. Turns out these were all rules the developer (Dean Essig) had dropped for reasons of simplicity.