House Rules are a mixed bag, but sometimes they work well enough that the creators agree that they're good additions to the game and promote them to official rules, or at least officially-sanctioned variations. Most rules that get this treatment add something significant to the game, or address issues the creators didn't catch the first time around.
Occasionally, these will come from a contest about designing house rules.
Sometimes, the Ascended House Rule may not show up in printings of a tabletop game, but an official Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation still gives you the option to use it.
Compare Ascended Fanon for a narrative equivalent. See also Popular Game Variant for popular house rules, though they sometimes go on to become Ascended House Rules.
Examples
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Board Games
- Chess:
- A common house rule for the base game is that when a pawn gets promoted to Queen, that Queen can be represented with an upside down rook. This can happen when the actual Queen is still on the board and no replacement is available. This house rule is actually included in the official United States Chess Federation rulebook, but not in the FIDE rules that are used in the rest of the world, and doing so under those rules will result in an arbiter coming to the table, turning the Rook back the right way up and forcing you to play on with the "Queen" becoming a Rook instead.
- Classical time controls (at least 2 hours per player) may be the "default", but there are also faster time controls like rapid (15 minutes plus 10 seconds additional time per move), blitz (3 minutes plus 2 additional seconds per move) and even bullet (less than 3 minutes total per player). Rapid and blitz have their own FIDE-sanctioned tournaments.
- Fischer Random Chess
, also known as Chess960, is a variant that randomizes the opening setup in order to downplay the memorization of openings and force players to evaluate the game over the board. It's popular enough that it was acknowledged by FIDE in 2008 and got its first sanctioned tournament in 2019, with many top chess players attending.
- Monopoly:
- The game's video game adaptations tend to include a lot of optional house rules that started out as unofficial house rules.
- At least one printing of the game acknowledges "no auctions", "Free Parking jackpot", "loans" and "deals not to charge each other rents" as popular house rules, but tells you not to use them because they make the games drag on.
- Some physical variations incorporate popular house rules into their standard rulesets. Enforced ridiculously in the Longest Game Ever edition, which uses several popular house rules like "no auctions" and "Free Parking jackpot" fully understanding that these make the game take even longer, to the point where some players house rule out the "house rules"!
- In Pandemic, the player roles are supposed to be randomly distributed, but a large number of players prefer to let people choose their roles, or otherwise create a draft system that gives players a greater degree of control over what role they end up with. A few of the spin-offs adapt this into the official ruleset; Reign of Cthulhu for example gives the first player a choice of two roles, with the unselected role being passed to the next player alongside a new one for them to choose, repeating until everybody has selected their role.
- In Star of Africa, it was possible to have a situation where nobody can win the game; players required money to move across sea, and if the Star was on an island and nobody had money, or the players were stuck on the islands without money, the game was unwinnable. After more than 50 years of various house rules to prevent this, a re-release finally added an Obvious Rule Patch that fixed it by making it possible to slowly move across the sea for free.
- Star Realms: Fans of the game have their own variants and rules, some of which were mentioned on the official blog. One example is having five "Trade Stacks" instead of just a single Trade deck and the trade row. Done for reasons of practicality: if the players are using every set and expansion pack in the game, the result would be a large Trade Tower.
- Uno: Mattel once held a contest to see what house rules people used, and chose the following three to be added as official variants:
- Jump-in Uno: If you have the exact same card as the top of the discard pile, you may play it immediately — even if it isn't your turn. Play resumes from the player who "jumped in".
- Seven-O Uno: Like regular Uno, except that playing a 0 forces every player to pass their hand to the next player in the direction of play, and that playing a seven forces you to trade your hand with a player of your choice.
- Progressive Uno: Allows Draw Two and Draw Four cards to be stacked on top of cards of the same type, but does not let you stack Draw Twos on Draw Fours, or vice versa.
- Wingspan: Many players dislike the "Power 4" for being too powerful, and have house rules to nerf them or remove them from the game. The Board Game Arena adaptation has an option to remove the Power 4 from the game.
Collectible Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering:
- Rules taken for granted today like the limit of 4 of each card and "play or draw" (the choice between going first or being able to draw an extra card) started as house rules.
- The fan-made format Elder Dragon Highlander, later renamed Commander, had its own official unofficial rules put together by people outside of Wizards of the Coast. It has since been promoted to an official format that gets dedicated sets and decks.
- Oathbreaker is a fan-made format with some parallels to Commander that was popular around 2019. Oddly enough, Wizards chose to recognize it in 2023.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Rush Duel format has rules like "Players can Normal Summon/Set as many monsters as they want in a single turn." and "During their Draw Phase, the turn player draws cards until they have five cards in their hand", which resemble how a lot of kids played the game.
Tabletop RPGs
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: In earlier editions, Honest Rolls Character (six ability scores rolled in order with no rerolls) was the default, but many groups implemented more generous ability score generation methods or allow rerolls when a character is stuck with nigh unplayable stats. With 3rd Edition, the rules were changed to favor above average rolls with the default being 4d6 drop lowest (since the main characters are heroes) and to allow a complete set of rolls to be thrown out if they didn't meet certain minimum criteria. Point buy (where players have a set number of points they can spend across each ability, with increases to scores above 13 costing more) is also an official rule variant, and became the standard method to generate ability scores in 3.X-based video game adaptations.
- Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: A common house rule has been for a skill check to automatically succeed on a natural 20 roll, and for it to automatically fail for a natural 1 (this normally only applies to attack rolls and saving throws). The 5th edition expansion One D&D planned to implement this as part of its base rules; however, this was rolled back due to protests from community members, who preferred it remain a house rule due to inevitable problems that would result from a natural 20 succeeding any skill check.
- GURPS: The change to hit and fatigue points. Formerly, fatigue points (tiredness) was based on Strength, while hit points (being cut to pieces-ness) was based on Health. Compendium I suggested reversing them; after all, muscles can help stop injury, while someone who's fit should have more endurance in a marathon, right? As of 4th edition, that's official. (Also helps mages from trying to get 12 ST to help get the FP needed for their magic..)
War Games
- Warhammer 40,000: The "snake eyes on a Leadership test means an automatic pass" rule was taken from 40K and absorbed into the Warhammer Fantasy house-rule pool so spectacularly that a) many people were convinced it was an actual rule and b) a later edition made these people become right.
- Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game had a strange variant: the "all alone" rule (lone models outnumbered at least two-to-one by enemies had to take a Courage test before moving and retreat on a failure) was removed from the game in the 2nd edition entirely because most players chose to ignore it.
Video Games
- The "treaty" game mode (which prevents all combat until a time limit is reached) in Age of Empires III is an official implementation of "no early rush" agreements that were common among the multiplayer circles of earlier entries.
- Halo:
- The "Infection" gametype is based on a popular fan-made "Zombies" mode in Halo 2. This mode saw players manually switch teams if they were killed by a zombie, and since team-specific loadouts were not yet an option it relied on the honor rule that zombies could not use anything other than the Energy Sword. Team-specific weapon loadouts and team switching upon death both became standard features of custom gametypes starting in Halo 3.
- Rooster Teeth invented "Grifball" as a variant of Neutral Bomb Assault on the Foundry map, where the only weapons available were melee weapons and the shields on the bomb carrier were upped to much higher levels, and it turned the bomb carrier into an orange-colored soldier resembling Grif from Red vs. Blue (hence the name). Functionally, it was like a more violent version of football (either variety) in the Halo 3 engine. It caught fire almost immediately and has been an ascended game mode since Reach.
- "Husky Raid" (Capture the Flag played on a very narrow, linear map with random weapons upon respawn), a staple from Halo 4 onwards, is another gametype that originated as a community creation.
- League of Legends was home to a popular unofficial game mode called "All Random All Mid", whose origins and popularity go all the way back to League's spiritual predecessor, Defense of the Ancients. As the name suggests, all players pick a random champion and — instead of fighting the massive, macro-intensive game among the entire map — all teams clump up and brawl in the mid-lane for non-stop teamfighting. In June 2012, Riot enabled the Proving Grounds (originally a single-lane map used for the game's tutorial mode) for use in custom games, indirectly to allow for more well-maintained ARAM games, and the mode proved so popular that ARAM was officially made a permanent game mode in patch 3.6, with Riot designing the all-new Howling Abyss to serve as its map.
- Team Fortress 2 has a popular community game mode, Vs Saxton Hale, where one player becomes Saxton Hale, and the rest of the server teams up to kill him. It finally became an official game mode with the Summer 2023 update.
