Official Game Variant

A tabletop game comes with an official variant. Sometimes they're just there to spice things up and add variety, but it's also common for games to feature these to meet needs the main ruleset isn't as suited for.

Variants may change the difficulty of a game; they may be simplified and beginner-friendly, or they may provide a deeper, more complex experience best enjoyed by those who are already familiar with the normal rules. They may also serve to make the game shorter or longer.

It's not uncommon for Digital Tabletop Game Adaptations to include rules variants. For other types of video games, a variant only counts as this trope if it's described in the manual or in-game text without actually having explicit rules for it programmed into the game.

Compare Expansion Pack for when an expansion adds content to a game, and Junior Variant for when a game gets a stand-alone version intended for a younger demographic.

See Popular Game Variant for popular, unofficial variants, and Ascended House Rules for when an unofficial house rule goes on to become an official rule.

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Examples:

Board Games

• Azul has a basic variant where the game dictates where tiles of each colour goes on the playing board, and an advanced variant where you can place them anywhere.
• Boggle: While Big Boggle and Super Big Boggle raise the minimum word length to four letters, but the official rules allow players to drop the requirement to three letters.
• Canopy comes with an optional set of cards that temporarily change the rules for each season.
• Carcassonne:
  • The game's website used to feature a list of selected variants.
  • The official Board Game Arena adaptation has a "strategic variant" where the players get a hand of 3 tiles instead of just having to draw one and play it. This allows for more planning.
• LEGO Games rule booklets encourage introducing home rules and provide several samples. Heroica, for example, has "Battle Mode", in which one player takes control of the monster army.
• Monopoly:
  • Official rulebooks feature rules for a shorter game, which include giving each player three free properties at the start of the game, and ending the game when one player goes bankrupt (so no Player Elimination or waiting for the game to finish once you're out).
  • The game's video game adaptations tend to include a lot of optional house rules that started out as unofficial house rules.
• When playing Pandemic at Standard or Heroic difficulty, the game tells players to hide their cards so that "everyone has information to contribute to play discussions". However, the manual suggests that experienced groups can play with open hands if they want to.
• The main variant of Res Arcana deals 8 random artifacts to each player, but there are two variants where the artifacts are drafted instead. The first works for any player count and has a pick-and-pass draft. The second is a 2-player-only mode played over 3 rounds with the same mages and artifacts, where the later rounds have the artifacts drafted in a different way.
• Space Base has a "Light Speed" variant that speeds up the game by giving each player more starting resources, allowing them to kickstart their engines.
• 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:
  • The manual for the Oceania Expansion acknowledges that the new Nectar resource makes the Common Raven and Chihuahuan Raven powerful, and suggests removing them from the deck if you think it makes them too strong.
  • The manuals say that you're free to mix and match the decks as you'd like. It also says that you can use the Oceania playmat even without the Oceania birds.

Collectible Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The game far exceeded the expectations of creator Richard Garfield, Ph.D. (who is on record as having allowed several Game Breakers to be printed because he didn't expect the average player to spend more than $40 on the game). This meant it had no plans for combating Power Creep. It eventually instituted some Official Game Variants by dividing into two basic "formats": Type 1 allowed any card ever printed, ever, while Type 2 only allowed cards that had been printed (or re-printed — Magic reprints things a lot) in the past two years. Type 1.5, which was identical to Type 1 except with a much larger ban list, was introduced in 1997. At some point these formats were renamed "Vintage," "Standard" and "Legacy," becoming slightly less technical and also paving the way for additional formats — "Modern," allowing only cards printed since the 2003 Core Set (which have a different GUI those that came before), and "Pioneer," allowing only those cards printed from "Return to Ravnica" in 2012 onward.
  • A Game Mod called "Elder Dragon Highlander" has become its own format called "Commander," and, despite being intentionally Denser and Wackier, is the most popular format in the game.^note All the other formats have a minimum of 60-card decks — which, if you're Min-Maxing like any good Magic player does, also means a maximum of 60 cards. They also allow you to have 4 copies of any given spell or non-basic land in your deck. If there's something specific you're looking for, you have a 1-in-15 chance of drawing it. Elder Dragon Highlander forces a minimum of 100 cards, and restricts you to 1 copy per non-basic land. Hence "Highlander": to quote the Tag Line of that franchise, "There Can Be Only One." Why "Elder Dragon"? The original Commanders were fancy Legendary Elder Dragon creatures that cost three colors of mana, controlled which colors you were allowed to use in your deck, and could come Back from the Dead at any time (though you paid an ever-increasing "Commander tax" for each death). Eventually the rules were widened to allow any Legendary creature to become a Commander. The result is that your deck's strategy is simultaneously more streamlined — you build it around your Commander, which you always have access to — but simultaneously more haphazard, since your deck is partially Filler, making room for wilder swings, sillier plays and more chaotic matches.
  • Oddly, Wizards chose to recognize the fan-made Oathbreaker format — a Commander variant with less silliness, and which has you pick a planeswalker (your "Oathbreaker") and a signature spell instead of a commander — years after its peaks.

Tabletop RPG

• Pathfinder:
  • Ultimate Combat, which introduces firearms to First Edition, lists off five possible different campaign-wide Technology Levels for guns, modifying which types of firearms and gunslinging classes are available. These range from "No Guns", to the midlevel "Emerging Guns" (the Gunslinger class introduced in the book is intended for this tech level), up to "Guns Everywhere" (guns are reclassified as simple weapons and cost 10% of their listed value).
  • The Pathfinder Unchained family of supplements for First Edition includes a number of variant rules, ranging from Obvious Rule Patches to several classes (notably Rogue and Summoner), to Revised Action Economy, which essentially back-ports the action economy of Second Edition into First Edition.

Video Games

• Goat Simulator 3: Downplayed by suggesting the general idea rather than anything specific. It has several mini-games built in, and one of the loading screen tips suggests that if any overpowered gear abilities are ruining the experience, then some house rules should be agreed on.
• The manual for Super Smash Bros. Melee suggests several do-it-yourself minigames, such as racing around the Temple stage or using the rock on the Kongo Jungle^note now Kongo Falls stage for king-of-the-rock.

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