New Rules for Classic Games

Author: R. Wayne Schmittberger   Publisher: John Wiley & Sons.   Pages: 245   Price: $9.95   ISBN: 0471536210



Expansion sets are all the rage these days. Now you can herd your Settlers on to boats or send them to the stars, you can ship your Caballeros off to France or throw them in jail, and a game about growing and selling beans can now be made even more surreal with the addition of pirates. But although expansion are having a bit of a renaissance these days, we old-time gamers know they are certainly nothing new. Between Illuminati, Car Wars, Ogre and GURPS, Steve Jackson Games was virtually built on expansions. And the Mayfair "Cosmic Encounter" set is a distillation of the original Eon game plus the no less than nine supplements. In fact, back in the 80's it was pretty much a given that if a small game company released a hit, you could expect a slew of expansion to come down the pike at any moment.


When I first picked up "New Rules For Classic Games", I thought it would be a compendium of house rules for popular commercial games like Monopoly and Boggle. In reality, such rules only make up about a fourth of the book. But this ground is covered by the first chapter "New Twists on Old Favorites", and given more attention in the chapter "More Variations ". Amongst the games for which house rules are provided: Pente, Mastermind, Chess and (somewhat incongruently) Nerf Ping-Pong. One suggestion I particularly like is Toric Scrabble, where words can go off the right edge of the board and "wrap" around to the other side. And next time I set up the Risk board, I'll propose to my opponents that we each start with a warhead as outlined in "Tactical Nuclear Risk". Schmittberger also does the world a favor by explaining, once and for all, why the "Land on Free Parking, get the Jackpot" variant in Monopoly is terrible house rule: it's almost a foolproof method for ensuring that the bank goes broke before the end of the game.

Some of the other early chapters deal with modifying a game to meet your current circumstances. "Doubling Up" explains how multiple sets of the same game (such as Backgammon or Chess) can be used in conjunction to create new, larger games. "Handicapping" offers tips on how to enliven various games between players of unequal skill, such as allowing a weaker Scrabble player unlimited access to the dictionary. And "Changing the Number of Players" gives advice on how to tinker with a game's rules to accommodate as many or as few players as you have willing to play. Most of these brief chapters offer less in the way of specific fixes for specific games, instead offering general advice that can apply to a wide variety of pastimes (such as how to turn almost any game into a "team" competition, or how to avoid three-player "Minor Diplomacy" problems.

The next few chapters are not so much rules variations, as a compilation of completely new games. "New Ways to Use Game Equipment" -- by far the lengthiest chapter in the book -- is crammed full of rules for original and previously published games that can be played with standard playing cards, checkers sets, Mancala boards and the like. This is followed by two more chapters that are almost exclusively complete games rather than rules variations: "Paper & Pencil and No-equipment Games" and "Party Games".

The book then returns to rules variations as the final few chapters offer a wealth of options for Backgammon, Checkers and Chess. The first two essentially outline all the regional variants for these games, ranging from Dutch Backgammon to Anglo-American Checkers. While the Chess chapter includes region variants as well, it also features a whole raft of additional rules that you could add to your game. He explains many of the most interesting pieces that appear in "exotic" chess versions (such as the Grasshopper, which moves exactly like a Queen but must jump at least one other piece, and the archbishop which combines the movement of the bishop and the knight). Many of the most intriguing Chess variants come about by changing the end conditions. Take, for example, Giveaway Chess, in which captures are mandatory and the object is to lose all your pieces. And in Schmittberger's own creation "Extinction Chess", the other player wins if you lose all of one type of piece, such as your one King, your one Queen, both rooks or all eight pawns. Because it plays fairly quickly, I play Extinctions Chess more often than orthodox Chess.

All in all a very useful book, and one that any game connoisseur will want to have on his shelf. Its one major flaw is its misleading title, since about half of the material outlines complete games rather than rules variants. For this reason, I bought this thinking I was getting something else entirely. As it turned out, I'm more happy with what I received than what I had expected.