Tabletop games leave the players in charge of enforcing the rules. Sometimes, this goes wrong.
- A minor misreading leads to an incorrect rule that makes sense, but changes the game significantly (there's a big difference between "you can summon a monster if you can pay its coin cost or you control its associated location", and requiring both conditions to be fulfilled).
- The rule requires players to do something they're not used to, such as any form of shuffle more complicated than just "jam all the cards together". Particularly common for gateway games.
- The rule deviates from the norms of the game, or is not represented in the iconography. (For instance if there's a series of identical-looking "X Coins" cards where low-value ones can be played at any time, while the highest one can only be played if you're out of money.)
- The rule exists for balance reasons, but doesn't make much sense with the game's theming.
- The rule is particularly complicated. For cases of this, see That One Rule.
- The rulebook fails to properly explain or emphasize the rule.
- It's an Obvious Rule Patch that patches a non-obvious Game-Breaker.
- A Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation contains the rules mistake, whether due to a bug or the developers getting it wrong.
- A Popular Game Variant is common enough to be passed to new players who themselves never learn the official rule.
Contrast Popular Game Variant when people intentionally choose to deviate from the written rules. However, they can overlap — if Alice accidentally forgets about auctions while teaching Bob Monopoly, they might keep playing without auctions even after learning the official rule.
- Nona: Aren't these technically a subtrope of Popular Game Variant under the current definition?
- Maths: Good catch. When/if this gets TLP'd, I'll probably redefine Popular Game Variant to only cover ones that are used on purpose (at least some of the time).
In some cases, the designer may say "screw it" and make them Ascended House Rules.
While this is rare in video games, it sometimes happens. For instance, you may see a lot of posts from users who tried certain item combinations that didn't work the way they expected them to, and are confused about why that happened.
Examples
Tabletop Games
- 7 Wonders:
- New players often forget that all buildings are subject to a Uniqueness Rule (i.e. you can't have multiples of them). This likely happens because the rule exists for balance reasons — there's no logical reason why a city can't have two schools.
- Some players mess up the chaining rules: the intention is that if you have a building, you can build its chained building(s) for free. The mistake is instead thinking that in order to build a chained building, you have to both pay its resource cost and have the building that chains into it. This likely happens because "building X is a prerequisite if you want to build building Y" makes more sense than "if you have building X, you can build building Y for zero cost".
- Agricola:
- The way animal breeding works is a bit unintuitive: If you have two animals of the same type, you get one baby animal. Any animals beyond the second don't matter. The mistake of instead giving players one baby animal per pair of animals is common enough that the rulebook in the 2-player spin-off Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small goes out of its way to draw attention to it.
- It's not uncommon for players to forget to replenish resources, which makes the game harder than it should be.
- Azul: While the rules are generally straightforward once you get going, the instructions on what to do if you place two tiles vertically on the same round is easy to miss.note If players don't catch this stipulation, they'll either have to look it up, or come to an interpretation on the fly.
- Chess:
- New players not knowing about en passant and thinking their opponent cheated to capture their pawn is so common that it's a meme.
- While people with more than a passing interest in the game are aware how the game draws under three-fold repetition and the fifty move rule, the common belief is that either if those conditions end the game automatically. However, if neither player draws attention to the draw, tournament rules allow the game to continue to five-fold repetition or seventy-five moves. That being said, there's rarely a case where neither player brings up the draw, and most computers tie the game automatically.
- Monopoly has many common house rules that straddle the line between this and Popular Game Variant — some people know that they're not part of the official rules, others do not. The most famous of these is Free Parking, which is supposed to be a neutral space, but often provides money to the player landing there due to propagation of house rules.
- Pandemic has two common rules screw-ups that mess up the game's difficulty:
- The way the infection deck is reshuffled during each epidemic is not how most people are used to shuffling cards: the proper procedure is to shuffle the discard pile only, then put it on top of the infection deck so that the same cities will keep being attacked by the diseases. The common mistake is to instead shuffle the discard pile into the deck, which makes the game easier than it should be by spreading the disease cubes too thin to provide much risk of an outbreak.
- Many new players think you need to eradicate all four diseases. In reality, it's enough to Discover a Cure for all of them, with eradication being optional. This mistake makes the game harder than it should be.
- Uno: Officially, a Wild Draw Four card may only be played by a player who otherwise can't match the color. Whether or not a table plays with this rule, the further stipulation that this inability to play can be bluffed, albeit with a steep penalty, is virtually unheard of. This likely happens because cards with similar effects are straight-forward and have no additional rules (both Wilds and Draw 2s can be played regardless of your other cards, so they also lack the bluffing aspect).
Video Games
- Slay the Spire: Mark of the Bloom (which prevents all healing) is infamous for how often it makes confused players ask why they died when they had items that "should have" revived them (Fairy in a Bottle or Lizard Tail). The issue is probably that people tend to think of Fairy in a Bottle and Lizard Tail as something closer to 1-ups than healing, even though a close reading of their effects says "When you would die, heal instead", so Mark of the Bloom shuts them down and you still die.
