Unpopular opinion: the guy who taught me Catan at a Reno bar was right about house rules
Sat down at a table at The Glass Die in Reno about 6 months ago with three strangers and one guy named Dave who ran the whole game from memory. I tried to play pure by the book, and Dave said the table had one house rule: no trading on your first turn. I grumbled, but it killed the whole "everyone hands the leader free bricks" thing, and the game stayed close for 90 minutes instead of ending in 20. What really got me was his reason. He said, "A rule that makes every game end the same way isn't a rule, it's a script." He also kept a tiny notebook of 14 house rules he'd tried since 2019 and crossed out 9 of them for being duds. Now my group argues every week about whether to add a rule or keep it clean, and I want to hear how other tables handle it. Does your group have a house rule you swear by, or one you had to kill?