House Rules describe rules which have been unofficially added to a game (usually tabletop) due to personal preference of the players. By definition, this would be an audience reaction. However, some games encourage House Rules in an official capacity, while other works display them in-universe. Further, some games, especially card games, have rules so varied that no single list of rules could be considered comprehensive. For comparison, the page for Speedrun is listed as YMMV, with Timed Mission being a main trope for in-game examples.

Wick check (link):

• Official in some capacity (11/56, 19.6%)
• Unofficial (16/56, 28.6%)
• In-Universe (11/56, 19.6%)
• No one standard ruleset (4/56, 7.14%)
• ZCE and Unclear use (7/56, 12.5%)
• Discarded for irrelevance (6/56, 10.7%)

So this one's clearly all over the place, but excluding a surprising number of in-universe examples, I think we can split most the examples into a few camps:

• Ascended House Rules: A sister to Ascended Fanon where game-makers officially introduce a popular unofficial rule.
• Popular Variant: A rule or set of rules that aren't anywhere in the rules, but see wide use nonetheless.
• Nebulous Ruleset: A subset of traditional games that take on too many unique forms to have one set of rules be considered "official".

This term has offsite use long predating the wiki, so I lean towards keeping the current page, albeit on YMMV. However, I would not be opposed to a disambiguation if that will do more to solve this problem in the long run.

• Mega Man Maker:
  • Antepiece: In the tutorial, Dr. Wily and Dr. Light advise to introduce a gimmick in a safe way first before testing the player with it. It's generally considered bad practice among the community to introduce a new gimmick in the level in a room with too many enemies, or, even worse, with One-Hit Kill hazards in it ^note Seasoned level builders never take another player's knowledge of a level object for granted since there are so many things to work with in Mega Man Maker and you can never tell if the person playing is a veteran of the series or a newcomer with little knowledge of the level hazards and gimmicks. It says "among the community, but the in-game suggestions made me put it here to be safe.''
• In Afrikan tähti, it was possible to get permanently stuck on an island because of the cost of travelling by sea and the possibility of getting robbed or finding the titular diamond on one of the islands. After 50 years of unwinnable games and House Rules, the sea travel was patched to resolve the formerly unwinnable situations by making sea travel free if the player has no money — but only 2 spaces at a time. Ascended House Rule, I think
• The Witcher: Game of Imagination:
  • Dump Stat: Movement. Dear God, Movement. The only thing it's used for is measuring how long a distance a character can travel during a single round of a fight (which is irrevelant, as sooner or later you will end up in melee distance), and while travelling the world (which is irrevelant, as when riding or traveling by any other means than on foot you use the Movement of your mount or vehicle). There are dozens of House Rules to derive it from different Stats to save Stat Points.
  • House Rules: The authors heavily encourage this, pointing out that their game and rules can and sometimes even should be changed to enhance the gameplay. They also discourage doing everything by the book, since it can kill the creativity of both players and the GM. ''Authors encouraging it was enough to get into this bucket, but Dump Stat is more YMMV).
• Unstable Equilibrium: Counter-Strike: Online multiplayer team games such as CounterStrike often give the winning team a bigger reward. This, of course, means that as one side keeps winning, the losing team slowly becomes crippled relative to the winning side. Which is why some servers have House Rules such as a side that has lost a certain times in a row may suddenly receive a mysterious cash infusion so that they can afford the same weapons as the winning side. I'm assuming that as a video game, there's a way to do this without altering the game's code
• 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.
• Cards Against Humanity: The instructions feature a list of house rules for the players to potentially include, including using Rando Cardrissian as a ghost player or passing your turn so you can discard your hand. While the official instructions can't say it for legal reasons, it's also pretty common to turn the game into a drinking game.
• Game Shows: Jeopardy!: The game itself was not necessarily the point of criticism; all versions of the home-game adaptation – and there were several – are playable. But critics often point at these as faults:
  • The 2016 version from Outset Media takes a cue from the Tyco version, having category cards placed into holders mounted to stands, but has the typical three-person play pattern akin to the other versions (probably because a lot of people decided to implement House Rules to play the Tyco version by the normal rules). I think I'm reading this right
• Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: The sandbox mod is a Game Mod for a board game sandbox like Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia. This approach has two major differences from the above: The first is that while a few games have paid official mods or mods with the Approval of God, many — if not most — are unofficial Fan Remakes. The second is that these (especially unofficial ones) tend to have less automation, which gives them a learning curve and makes them more cumbersome to play. For instance, if you want to play a card that says "Gain 5 HP", you'd have to select the card, move it to the discard pile, and then increase your HP by 5 manually.^note Most other implementations would just let you click on the card to have the game give you 5 HP and put it in the discard pile for you. On the positive side, less automation gives you more freedom to play the game exactly the way you want, as you can remove a Game-Breaker or play with your preferred House Rules without having to outright modify the game.
• Self-Parody: Many people complain about Monopoly taking forever. Hasbro decided to lean into this and release Monopoly: Longest Game Ever, which is deliberately designed to take an eternity with its massive game board, single die, and bizarre rules like "you don't lose by going bankrupt" and "if you need more money, you can tear up your bills to get more". It also explicitly features two common House Rules ("no auctions" and "Free Parking jackpot") that mostly serve to drag out the game. The game only ends once someone owns every single property, which is made even harder by the added rule of "if you land on someone's property, you can force them to sell it to you if you pay them enough".
• Video Game/Smite: Assault: A spin-off of the standard game mode "ARAM (All Random All Mid)" seen in others MOBAs, where in players take randomly selected gods and go in only one lane and have one chance to buy items at the shop after spawning, being unable to heal up from it or buy again until after death and respawn. I think
• Pokémon Zeta and Omicron: House Rules: The game offers a built-in Nuzlocke mode, a Randomizer (every Pokémon, wild trained or gifted, is chosen randomly) mode, and a Randomlocke (both of those together) mode. The next update will also include Solo (you can choose any Pokémon at the beginning of the game and you will not be able to catch any more) and PP Challenge (PP can only be restored with items). You can also select how much "swag" your rival has depending on how much you wish to hate him.

• Speedrun:
  • House Rules: These are often a necessity, since there are rarely any "official" rules on how speedrunning should be conducted.
    • Some rulesets result from the community's broad range of opinions on how speedrunning should work, particularly with regards to bugs and exploits and to what degree they should be allowed. Some players dislike using them, since they divest a game of its intended challenges. For others, half the fun is finding creative ways to break a game. Depending on the size of the speedrunning community for a particular game, there may be several subgroups with rules catering to the preferences of each.
    • Popular games often have many different speedrunning categories, such as fastest overall completion (Any%), fastest completion while collecting all items/finding all secrets (100%), and fastest times for various joke categories (getting banned from online play, going swimming, burning a pie) and other Self-Imposed Challenge runs (such as competing the game without dying).
• Plot Armor: Heavy Gear uses a system that rates NPCs by chess pieces, to help GMs to maintain the continuity of the overall fiction. Pawns are considered nameless extras, who are completely expendable, while the fates of Kings, Queens and Rooks are important figures, who are intrinsic to historical events. This is completely optional, as many players prefer to play the game in their own way.
• 'Magic: The Gathering: '(It works.) ^Explanation A Hand Wave that frequently appears on custom cards, especially in r/HellsCube, for unusual mechanics which are easy to explain intuitively but difficult to define within and/or explicitly contrary to the official Magic'' rules.
• Tic-Tac-Toe:
  • Once the 3×3 grid gets too easy, players may trade up to a larger grid size.
  • In a "3D" variant, played simultaneously on three separate grids (to simulate a cube), where getting three in a row in any direction (even across different grids) counts as a win.
    • A manufactured version called Qubic provided both of the above in physical form: four transparent plastic boards with 4×4 grids, with metal posts to stack the layers and colored disks to represent players' moves.
  • "Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe" adds a layer. It uses a big 3×3 grid where each cell contains a standard 3×3 board. Winning one of the small games captures the cell for the big game. As an additional twist, the cell a player marks dictates which board their opponent can play next. If X marks the center of a small board, O must make their next play somewhere on the center board of the big game.
  • X typically goes first, but that's up to preference really. Last bullet might fit better in lack of a standard ruleset
• Inhuman Human: A rather common result of the Dungeons & Dragons spell Reincarnate, especially with House Rules or the rules from the earlier editions, although thankfully and surprisingly this doesn't involve shambling undead. The spell returns characters, with their original knowledge and abilities, into the adult body of a random species. That's often not a problem, until your Warrior comes back as a wren, or your Wizard as a badger.
• Multi-Ranged Master: Warhammer 40,000: Upgrades for squads generally allow the squad to have different ranged weapons from one another. Mixing anti-tank and anti-infantry weapons in the same squad is not advised though, since they can only attack one or the other in (standard, mind you) rules. Technically correct, but also a needless pothole
• Tier Induced Scrappy Tiers: Dungeons & Dragons: Technically a sandbox, but I expect this to get merged back in
  • The Soulknife occupies the position of being one of the most well-liked and most-hated classes in 3.5e. The idea of creating a weapon out of psychic energy and going to town on your foes earned fans for its cool factor, but mechanically the Soulknife's main class feature was owning a magic weapon that upgraded later than weapons you craft yourself and didn't even have the decency to be a Laser Blade. The class was a worse combatant than an ordinary fighter and didn't have much else going for it, dooming it to be an ineffective novelty combatant. But its sheer coolness meant that players would continually try to come up with House Rules to fix the class and make it more like the awesome warrior they envisioned. Later, Pathfinder's version (via third party publisher Dreamscarred Press) would fix the problems with the class.
  • Older than all of the above and going back to 1st Edition, you have the Thief-Acrobat, a Thief subclass intended to focus on mobility and... well, acrobatics. Unfortunately, the tradeoff for this was losing pickpocketing, trapfinding, and lockpicking, which are the best reasons to keep a Thief in the party (and possibly more, the book suggests). In exchange, you got acrobatic tricks—and not even Charles Atlas Superpower acrobatic tricks, we're talking pole-vaulting, tightrope walking, and long jumping—that would probably be somewhat impressive in the Olympics, not so much in the dungeon where everyone has grappling hooks or flying carpets or winged horses or a magic-user with Fly. Their only particularly useful ability was a flat percentage chance to dodge attacks when they had the initiative, and considering they still had a Thief's hit dice, they'd better hope the rolls were in their favor.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Monopoly is argubly the most famous board game in existence, and probably the first thing that comes to mind when the average person thinks "board game." However, many aspects of the game, such as auctioning off any property that a player lands on but doesn't want to buy, are virtually unknown, and others, such as winning a pile of money by landing on Free Parking, are actually common "House Rules" rather than official rules of the game. And very few people know that it was originally invented as a condemnation, not a celebration, of capitalism.
• YMMV.Wingspan: High-Tier Scrappy: The members of the "Power Four", a quartet of Game-Breakers, are disliked for their extremely efficient resource conversion. This goes doubly for the Ravens, which also bless you with the ability to just take whatever food you want instead of relying on what happens to be available in the bird feeder. The Oceania Expansion makes them even better by letting them grab Nectar, which is wild and nets you a point bonus if you use a lot of it. As a result, many players either leave the Ravens out of the game (which the Ocenania Expansion's rulebook outright suggests) or add House Rules to nerf them (such as forbidding you from playing them in the first round). Additionally, the Board Game Arena implementation of the game offers an option to play without the Power Four.
• Catch Phrase: The game has a point limit of seven. Since points are entered manually, players can go on as long as they wish.
• Redundant Parody: Monopoly has inspired many parodies that joke about it representing "the evils of capitalism", along with a game called "Anti-Monopoly" that depicts the monopolists as the bad guys. While this fits the vast majority of modern versions of the game, this was the original version's entire point. Anyone who has played by the rules as written (i.e. no House Rules) knows that once any single player has a noticeable advantage, that player is virtually guaranteed to multiply that advantage and bankrupt everybody else in a relatively short time. That's deliberate.
• Dungeons & Dragons has no wound penalties, thus ensuring that any character with at least one hit point remaining (and several without that) is capable of any kind of action and exertion. This is Handwaved in some editions by the claim that hit points don't actually represent health, but the "ability to avoid injury" (despite the fact that they are recovered through bandages and magical curing spells). This, of course, inspired on RPG.net Fauxtivational Posters of bloodied and beaten (but still standing) characters with a caption of "I've still got one HP left!" (Or of Monty Python's Black Knight, captioned "Anything over 0 means I'm good to go, baby!") ... Due to this, a common set of House Rules is to have characters die after being dealt a truly massive amount of damage. (3.5 does have "Death by massive damage" rules — any hit that deals over 50 damage needs a fort save) Intermediate bullet point omitted
• YMMV.GoldenEye1997: Game-Breaker: Oddjob in multiplayer. Because of the combination of the game's controls and his short stature, every other characters' free-aimed shots sail above his head, forcing other players to stop and manually aim down to actually hit him. Because of this, a common house rule is to simply ban him from use. If you play a one-on-one match between Oddjob and Jaws (the tallest character in the game) with slappers only, it's already over. In fact, he's officially considered cheating by the developers themselves.
• The Forge: Universal System: One of the corollaries of the "System Does Matter" manifesto was that no role-playing game system can be truly universal, since the choice of what activities to stat out to what degree inherently encourages certain kinds of stories and experiences, while making others more difficult to run without extensive House Rules. Ironically, the Forge's legacy now includes quasi-univesal DIY design frameworks, such as Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged In The Dark, — game systems that are so open to modification, they have been rewritten by other authors for entirely different genres and settings without changing their core mechanics.
• Empty Room Psych: Monopoly has the infamous "Free Parking" square. This is the only square in the game in which nothing happens^note the "Jail/Just Visiting" square does nothing either, but it still serves a purpose in which it is a square you land on when you leave jail — it is, per the rules, "just a free resting space". Yet because everyone thinks each square needs to do something, many house rules have that square give some sort of bonus, like extra money, collected taxes, or the like.
• Tabletop Game/Monopoly:
  • Properties make up the cornerstone of the game. If a player lands on an unsold property square, they may buy the property at its listed price. If they decline, the property is sold at auction to the highest bidder.^note Neglecting to do this is not only one of the most unintentionally followed House Rules, but extends the length of the game considerably.
  • Chance and Community Chest cards can award the player money, take it away, or whisk him off to another square (including Jail). Free Parking is officially simply a "free" resting space, where nothing bad or good happens (when the players own all the properties, it's one of the few no one is charged to land on), but its actual use varies wildly based on House Rules; it either serves as a "blank" square, awards a player cash from the bank, or does something in the middle of those two extremes.
  • An Aesop: The game was devised as a teaching tool to show the effects of severe wealth inequality. Anyone who has played the game by the rules as written (i.e. no House Rules) knows that once any single player has a noticeable advantage, that player is virtually guaranteed to multiply that advantage and bankrupt everybody else in a relatively short time. That's deliberate.
  • House Rules:
    • The Free Parking Jackpot rule. Under the official game rules, nothing happens on Free Parking. Coming up with a use for it is one of the more popular house rules. Most house rules for Free Parking involve some kind of monetary reward; for example, setting aside any money lost due to the two tax spaces, Chance or Community Chest and making that the Free Parking prize. The official game rules actively discourage using Free Parking for this purpose, since the more money there is in play, the more difficult it is to force other players into bankruptcy. And games take long enough as it is. A possible solution offered by a number of online sites is to also add a win condition for reaching a certain amount of capital.
    • Officially, if there is a housing shortage, no property with a hotel can be mortgaged until the housing shortage is taken care of. A common house rule is to permit the skipping of houses in the building cycle in both directions, provided that the player can afford 4 houses on all properties AND THEN the hotel for each one.
    • The most frequently ignored official rule is this: if you decline to purchase a property that you landed on, it is supposed to be immediately put up to auction for anyone to buy. Most house rules simply declare a turn to be over if this happens, skipping the auction process. This rule, more than any other (even the "Free Parking Jackpot" rule), is responsible for Monopoly's reputation as a glacially-slow exercise in tedium. The faster the properties are bought up, the faster the real game (i.e. the trading) can get started. Ironically, most people ignore this rule because the auction process sounds tedious. Of course, another house rule to counter this is that whoever first lands on an unowned property is required to buy the property if they're not gonna auction it.
    • There used to be rules on the web of a two-board variant called Mafia Monopoly that required four players minimum, with each board being home turf to a gang. They were later removed.
    • There's a house rule that forbids buying property until you've completed one lap round the board. It's intended to Nerf the advantage of going first and put the players on a more even playing field, but it just unbalances the field even more since you often get at least one player who lands on Chance and draws "Advance to Go" or "Take a ride on the Reading" on their first turn and at least one player who keeps going to Jail to their increasing frustration.
    • According to the official rules, a player being in Jail doesn't stop them collecting rent if another player lands on their properties or building houses/hotels. As such, a common house rule prevents either of these actions taking place, making jail more of a punishment for everyone.
    • Another house rule is that the player with the most money at the end of an agreed-on time limit is the winner, regardless of whether anyone else is bankrupt. The Canadianopoly version of the game actually includes this in the official rules.
  • Self Paraody: (see official)

• High Stakes Poker: Introduced the world to the concept of running it twice. In a season one hand, Todd held queen ten, good for top pair on a queen nine six flop. Sammy Farha goes all-in with nine six for bottom two pair, and Todd eventually calls. With Sammy a more than two-to-one favorite, Todd asks Sammy to run it twice, and Sammy agreed. It was a good early indicator to the audience how different this could be from a tournament, where such a deal could never take place. Questioning whether this should be on a characters page, but the application seems correct.
• Craig Of The Creek S 1 E 21 Ace Of Squares: New Rules as the Plot Demands: The Creek's version of Four Square lets the Ace come up with House Rules at will. It's about as fair and fun as it sounds, which makes Craig decide to take it back to regular rules.
• Let's Play/Pokecapn:
  • Mario Party (1-8, with House Rules and they tally up their amount of stars throughout all games; started again with 9, where they do two maps)
  • House Rules: They play all the minigames without the instructions beforehand, which they refer to as Wario Party. Handicaps are assigned each game based on previous star and coin totals in varying ways. In their Mario Party 5 board, they're required to put a capsule on any available empty space to turn the entire board into a literal game board, and as of Mario Party 7, they are required to use items if available.
• Referenced by.../Monopoly: A Running Gag in Sally Forth (Howard) is the family playing Monopoly and Ted coming up with increasingly outlandish House Rules until what they're playing isn't really Monopoly any more.
• Web Video/Tabletop: Extrinsic Go-First Rule: Wil often introduces inventive House Rules to determine who goes first, such as when he let Greg Zeschuk go first in King of Tokyo on account of him having the most impressive beard of the four bearded guys at the table.
• Final Fantasy VIII:
  • Squall also learns to play the local Collectible Card Game, called "Triple Triad." Gameplay is quite simple: you get cards based on monsters and characters who have numbers in all four directions. You play these cards one at a time on a 3-by-3 grid. If you place a card you own next to a card your opponent owns, the rules compare the numbers that are facing each other, and if yours is higher, you "flip" their card to your side by changing its color to yours. After the grid is filled in, the player who "owns" the most cards wins. This execution can have lots of House Rules added onto it, which can make the situation much more complicated, but at its heart it is quite simple — and incredibly addicting.
  • Squall can duel the Queen of Cards, an eccentric individual who wanders the world. More importantly, he can pay her to alter the rules of the game. Every region has their own House Rules, and you can be responsible for spreading them throughout the world — which is good when the rule is "Open," "I can see my opponent's hand," but bad when the rule is "Random," "Both players' hands are determined by the Random Number God and therefore every match is a Luck-Based Mission." The Queen of Cards is the only way to alter rules in a controlled manner.
• Quest in Show: Unlike usual play podcasts, Quest In Show uses a custom ruleset (based on Powered by the Apocalypse) for its episodes.
• New Rules as the Plot Demands:
  • The Battle City rules themselves count as this. The rules used in the show were deliberately moved closer to that of the real life TCG with no greater justification than "Kaiba changed the rules for his tournament". If the new rules had just been for Battle City, it would be one thing, since tournaments sometimes use House Rules, but Kaiba somehow makes the rule change permanent: even after the tournament is over, nobody ever goes back to the pre-Battle City rules despite these being the official ones in-universe. Even players from alternate universes use Kaiba’s new rules for some reason! This is less true in the manga, however, where it's indicated that the "Super Expert" rules used in Battle City are simply a different format, with it being played before Battle City began. Out-of-universe, this was due to the "Expert Rules" format being introduced to the real card game (in its first few months in Japan, the card game used a Duelist Kingdom-esque ruleset), which was initially introduced as an alternate format but quickly became the only one.
  • Most tabletop roleplaying games incorporate what's generally known as "Rule 0", which is the GM's word is law, giving him free rein to adjust or ignore the rulebook at his whim as well as simply make up new rules on the spot. It's to be hoped that the GM will only do this to make the game more fun. House Rules should generally be negotiated and agreed upon before play begins. Misuse, but three unrelated examples on the same page
  • Goblins author Thunt ostensibly based his comic on Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, and yet frequently writes low-level characters dealing improbably-strong blows to high-level characters, like here and here. In both cases, the wooden guy with the green hair is level 10, fighting against level 2 characters. He's claimed that the fights 'work out fairly' within the House Rules he uses, at one point averting the trope by giving a play-by-play explaining how the fight would play out if it were at a gaming table.
• I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham: In an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL during the Duel Carnival, Yuma's opponent Housaku uses the Basket Rule for their duel, which requires each player to take one vegetable at random from his basket and eating it before attacking with a monster. Yuma is at a clear disadvantage because he claims he doesn't like tomatoes (which Housaku specializes in). After getting pounded by Housaku (and eventually making him angry for insulting his tomatoes) Kotori threatens to forcefeed them to Yuma if he doesn't eat them, so he is persuaded to try them... And finds them pretty good. He goes on to win the duel.
• Palladium Books: House Rules: The Megaversal system was designed as a homebrew for the founders' personal gaming group in the 1980s and changed very little since then. It's an eccentric system that is sometimes criticized for being rather clunky.
• HoistByHisOwnPetard.AnimeAndManga: Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions: Aigami uses his mystical Quantum Cube to force all his duels to cater to the House Rules of Dimension Summoning. This ends up helping Kaiba and Yugi a lot, as when they dueled him, they had a lot of high level monsters in their hands but Dimension Summoning allows one to summon without tributes. Aigami ends up losing due to the negative side effects of Dimension Summoning.

• Tabletop Game/Kings: Rules vary too much to call any one set "official."
  • To play, gather your buddies around the table and give everyone a glass of beer. Put the Gargle Blaster on the table and lay all the cards out in a circle around it, face down. The players then take turns drawing a random card, and have to take some kind of action depending on the card they drew. Drawn cards are not put back into the circle. There are so many different sets of House Rules in existence that a game of Kings almost always starts with a short discussion on the rules for each card, but here are some common ones. (If you have enough beer and want to get everyone drunk fast, replace "sip" with "entire glass").
  • Joker - Typically removed from the game; depends on the House Rules.
• Tabletop Game/Hearts: Deep breath
  • Boring, but Practical: Whoever has the two of clubs must make the opening lead into the first trick. If House Rules permits passing three cards onto your opponent on the left at the round's beginning, you'll want get rid of this card, so you're free to get rid of your highest club card thereafter with no penalty. Technically correct pothole, but cut for metatroping.
  • House Rules: There are many variants.
    • The jack of diamonds (or sometimes the ten) is worth minus 10 points; anyone managing to Shoot the Moon and get the jack of diamonds gets his choice of whether to take a minus 36 to his score, a minus 10 to his score and plus 26 to everyone else, or a plus 36 to everyone else. Another is Shooting the Sun, in which you take every trick, which is worth twice as much but otherwise identical to Shooting the Moon. Even the queen of spades as a penalty card wasn't part of the original rules (it used to be that the only penalty cards were the hearts).
    • Omnibus Hearts codified several house rules, including the Queen of Spades as the 13-point penalty, the Jack of Diamonds as -10 points, Shoot the Moon, card passing, and opening with the 2 of clubs. The Microsoft game is basically Omnibus on the computer.
    • One such house rule acts as an Obvious Rule Patch: if you shoot the moon, you can choose to subtract 26 points from your own score instead of adding 26 points to everyone else's score. This is to prevent a case where shooting the moon puts someone over 100 points, but the lowest score does not belong to the one who shot the moon.
    • Parker Brothers released a deck of cards called "Royal Hearts" that marked the 2 of Clubs as "Must lead first", used "Shoot the Moon"^note but note that the alternate Queens could change the value of doing such and had 4 alternate Queen Cards which could be substituted for the standard Queen cards^note what's more, you didn't have to use all 4— as seen, using Queen of Spades and Queen of Hearts only would tend to speed games way up!... Content cut for going into fourth indent; either way, all the rules listed here show the game not having a single, standardized ruleset
  • No, You Go First: Whoever has the two of clubs must make the opening lead into the first trick. Depending on House Rules that permits passing three cards onto your opponent on the left, it's usually advisable to get rid of this card as it's a wasted turn otherwise. Technically correct metatrope
  • The Strategist: To outlast your opponents with the fewest penalty points, a player is expected to become this for almost every single trick. If House Rules permits passing 3 cards off, they may have to resist the temptation to purge their hand of any given suit they have the least number of. Especially if that suit is spades, because they could end up getting stuck with the Queen of Spades as their only card of that suit and be unable to avoid winning her in a spade-leading trick. Another common tactic is to constantly lead with low numbered spades, in an attempt to "flush out" and safely avoid whoever has the Queen. Technically correct metatrope
• Tabletop Game/Mao:
  • As might be expected of such a mutable game, Mao is extremely prone to House Rules; it's pretty much a guarantee that any two groups of Mao players will play a slightly different version of the game.
  • House Rules: Any two different groups of people will play Mao slightly differently.
  • Loads and Loads of Rules: If you can play long enough, and people don't go crazy from trying to keep on top of them all. According to some House Rules, the winner is the last person to still have some kind of sanity remaining. Made a minor edit to this bullet, but the spirit remains in-tact
• Spin the Bottle: Get all your friends in a circle, place a bottle on its side in the center of the circle, and go round-robin in spinning the bottle (a la Wheel of Fortune). In the game's most basic version, you MUST smooch on the lips whoever the bottle points to when it comes to rest. Individual House Rules can determine who you can and cannot kiss (e.g. whether and which same-sex kisses are required, whether one has to kiss one's brother, sister, or other relation, etc., etc.), what the penalty is for NOT kissing a spun person, and other actions you can take.

• Firestorm Armada: All over the place, most commonly with custom designed ships.
• Eon: Zigzagged. There are four Dwarven clans; Ghor, Roghan, Drezin and Zolod, each with their own culture putting them somewhere on the Straight-to-Subverted spectrum.
  • ...sub-bullets omitted for irrelevance...
  • In the GURPS predecessor The Fantasy Trip, dwarves were straight out of the Tolkienian mold. However, some details (mostly concerning dwarf women) were left unspecified, meaning that players could form their own conclusions.
• Live-Action TV: "The Snowmen": When Clara has to describe her problem with one word, she says "Pond", which is only peripherally related to her actual problem, but conveniently happens to be the last name of the companion the Doctor is mourning. She probably has some awareness of the Ponds from her other echoed selves, but it's not explicit. I am being very generous by assuming this wick might belong given proper context.
• Season One: House Rules: Percy's "Gunslinger" class does not exist in D&D, so Matt made a special homebrew version for him. Being generous that this isn't clear misuse.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara: House Rules: The Chronicles of Mystara release includes seven house rules that you can unlock. ZCE, but one that clearly belongs in the top bucket
• Equivalent Exchange (Description): The principle of Equivalent Exchange typically says the object or goal a person will trade for must have equal value to what the person trades with. Who and what determines this "equivalency" varies from story to story
• House Rules: Fans have created rules for characters and weapons not published with the game. They include real life World War II vehicles and weapons, prototypes and other things that never made it to the battlefield and fictional characters suitable for the time period. Indiana Jones and Wolverine fighting the Red Skull and his E-100 Maus? Why not? Correctly gives a YMMV example, except this shouldn't be on the YMMV page
• Oripian Trail: Certain aspects of the campaign are homebrew, such as game mechanics and feats.

• Simple Staff: Red link, associated page lacks the corresponding wick
• House Rules: Self-explanatory
• Cloneopoly: A Running Gag in Sally Forth (Howard) is Ted getting the Monopoly board out and describing increasingly bizarre and arcane House Rules, to the point that it barely resembles Monopoly anymore. Sally and Hil have usually given up by then. Redundant to another wick
• 22: Possible bias — I wrote the example
• Playing House: Not to be confused with what Hugh Laurie did for a living, which in turn should not be confused with playing "doctor"; nor with House Rules. Disambiguation
• Afrikan tähti, a board game, has a round cardboard disc facing downwards on each location space. Landing on a space that still has its disc, you can either choose to pay or try your luck with the die to claim it. Three of these coins are Bandits: they steal all of the player's money. No buts. This could leave you on an island, and yes, travelling by ships costs money, meaning facing a Bandit on St. Helen or Madagascar was practically an instant game-over. House Rules were needed to fix this until decades later, new printings featured rules that featured an official solution to the problem. Used in the same context on another wick