House Rules
 

Last Night my brother and I were reminiscing our glorious Yu-Gi-Oh playing days

Actually we rarely played the game strictly by the given rules. No, I mean, the game itself was played strictly by the book, but we enhanced the gameplay in a way, sort of inspired by that boxing with a bit of chess in between..

We called it Gamer-Yu-Gi-Oh.
This basically means after both of us had made their turns we played some video-game with quick, competitive gameplay, like say... a Beat 'em Up. In our case Mostly Soul Calibur II and III and later a bit of Guilty Gear. And the winner got some benefit for the next turn... like drawing an additional card, not having to draw a card, getting a small amount of Life Points, choosing who'd play their turn first (effectively allowing a player to have two turns in a row), look at a card of the opponent etc. Maybe combined with a dice roll, which we didn't do. But in retrospect that seems like a good idea.

A perfect victory gave special rewards, but I forgot which.
If I were to play the game like that now I'd remove the dice roll.

To balance things out, every time someone won a match in the videogame the winner got a handicap. Which, luckily, is a feature of most Beat Em Ups.
If someone got too much of a winning streak he had to change his character or even let the game pick one randomly.

Any funky house rules you play by for just about anything?
Or even cool combinations of two distinct games like this?

Impress me.

I don't think we ever play any games by the printed rules ever. Mostly we combine multiple games and usually add drinking and betting rules somewhere.
My personal favourite is drinking Cluedo where it is normal cluedo but everytime you roll a 1 or get called into a room you have to take a drink. This sounds like a normal drinking game but is subtly effective because if the other players start to think you are working it out they ca just all call you into the room and make you take a whole lot of booze very quickly so you quickly forget your theory.
In the non-drinking side my favourite would probably be the existential game of life where we redecorated a game of life board with new clues, new pieces and new pathaways- the college pathaway is a giant looping vortex where it is nearly impossible to escape the constructs of others and to win the game you have to destroy your own playing pieces bit by bit. I should point out that this was invented because the original game of life is broken as all fuck.
The best bit, though, is we left some of the original cards in there so in between cards that mire you between your biological urge to have children and your own unfufilled dreams are cards like You have become president of the united states. Good times.

Haiku scrabble is a good one too- basically it's scrabble but we have syllable numbers (for example 5, 7, 5) and you cannot go over the syllables remaining for each line- for example player 1 plays a two syllable word, player 2 can only play a 1,2 or 3 syllable word- say he plays a 2, player 3 can only play a 1 syllable word, then we are on a new line so the next player can do anything up to 7.

Battle Monopoly.

We made a big conversion chart from Monopoly money to 3.0 DND equipment. Entering the same square as your enemy provoked a DND battle, loser goes to jail.

Fun times.

A long while ago, back when I watched the Yu-Gi-Oh anime on saturday mornings (the one with Yugi actually in it, not that shitty GX crap) my friend and I wanted to play Dungeon Dice Monsters (you know, that game in that spin-off/filler arc). The only problem was that we didn't want to buy the actual Dice Monsters game they were selling in the game shop, and this was also after I had gotten rid of most of my Yu-Gi-Oh cards in favor of Magic: The Gathering cards. So we made our own version of the game using MTG cards, and card-protectors as the "paths". I forget all the rules and whatnot, but it actually worked out really well.

... That has got to be the best idea I've heard in a LONG time for how to improve Monopoly.

Not entirely - Monopoly takes for fucking ever as it is. It mixes up the formula but drags it even longer, which can be torture.

I got the DDM set as a gift from someone, but it came with 6 monsters total i believe. So me and a friend used our decks and digimon toys. We cut the last two digits from the card's attack and defense. We used a chess board as the field placing the paths on top. Modifying monster effects on the go was a pain though.

You mean Dokapon Kingdom? I've been wanting to contribute to this thread, but I can't decide which is actually house rules to that game; being able to physically attack other players or not being able to physically attack other players. Those of you with any experience in the game will understand what I mean.

Also, "Cluedo?" We in the states call it by it's real name, Clue. I believe that the rest of the world's inability to call it by its real name speaks to some deficit in your national characters.

No, it's just a matter of translation.
Clue translates to "aanwijzing" in Dutch.
Cluedo is simply the nicer sounding alternative, even if it is a made-up word.

In that line of thought, why aren't you guys calling gin "jenever".
That's the original name for the drink. ;)

If you liked that, you might want to check out Culdcept, a mishmash of Monopoly and Magic: TG.

On topic, I have to say I can't remember ever playing a game of Monopoly where you could not buy property until you go around the board once.