New Rules for Classic Games

by R. Wayne Schmittberger

"An essential book for anyone interested in gameplay." —Games magazine If rules are made to be broken, then dust off those old games lying dormant in your closet, because your game playing just got a lot more exciting! New Rules for Classic Games, by games expert R. Wayne Schmittberger, is a complete guide to hundreds of new twists and variations guaranteed to expand and enliven your game repertoire. How Wraparound Worlds can run off an edge of the board and be continued on the other side. Another variation allows words to be spelled backwards! Extinction Think of every type of piece as a species; your goal is to prevent extinction of any of these species. Trivial An entertaining and challenging cross between Trivial Pursuit and tic-tac-toe. Auction Every property, no matter who lands on it, is sold to the highest bidder. You’ll find these and other exciting new challenges for card and dice games, chess, checkers, party games, and popular board games such as Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Parcheesi, Boggle, Othello, and Trivial Pursuit. And to make sure your game playing never gets stale, New Rules for Classic Games gives you rules for little-known games that can be played with equipment you already have and tips for doing your own rule writing!

Genres: Games, Game Design

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Michael A. Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps 4-. There are a few mistakes in the examples of play, and a lot of the games or variations weren't that interesting to me, but it's still a good book for someone interested in old school tabletop equipment based games.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim from Amazon's secondary market. In spite of its title, the book's offerings actually fall into three categories.

The first: actual new rules for classic games. Three stars. Far too many of the variations are elementary, stuff I could have come up with myself with a moment's thought, as with the interminable chapter on checkers variations that differ only trivially. But there are a few real winners here -- some chess variations, and some riveting Risk variations, really grabbed my attention.

The second: Classic rules for obscure games. Two stars. Schmittberger presents these as new rules for classic games on the flimsy basis that they can be played with Scrabble/chess/Go equipment. For the most part they're missable.

The third: Theory on designing new rules for existing games. Four stars. Unfortunately, Schmittberger's more abstract insights on how to go about modifying an old game are sparse, but the pieces of advice he does drop are gems. He should have used these insights as framing devices for the game variations he presents rather than using them as filler.

[Kevan Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a mishmash of a book - mostly known, historical variants of classic games, with a few slim sections of general-purpose game hacks and ways to fix problems with games like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, which I could have done with more of. Very much of its time for the early 90s, with a sense of being trapped on a desert island with only a few simple boardgames and your only option being to repurpose them.

[Jennifer Robb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Different ways to play games you already have. I most liked the variations on board games. I discovered that I had a hard time following the variations given for most strategy games. This may be because most of them were ones I'd never heard of or haven't ever played.