Hello,
For most of the games, I have added extra options to make the game more interesting, but you can always choose not to enable them if you want to stay close to the standard/official rules.
There are two things to consider, tough:
- Standard/official rules are sometimes not what most of the players expect / are used to play with. The best example is uno: in standard there's no interception, no cumulation, but there's bluff; statistics show that it's usually the opposite that is chosen on the playroom, i.e. interceptions and cumulation are generally enabled, while bluff hasn't always the majority. Other example: 1000 miles, where officially accumulation of problems and deck reshuffle aren't part of the rules; again statistics generally show that players largely prefer play with them enabled.
- What are standard or official rules ? For uno or monopoly that's quite clear, rules are provided with the box. For some others it's less clear, for example due to its ancestors, rummy has two family of rules: the plastic tile version (with manipulations but no discard) vs. the traditional card game(with single or multiple discard but no manipulations). Finally, many games are coming from traditions and in this case there may not be any real source of absolute truth; the best is to propose different variants to make everybody happy.
For the particular case of farkle, since I'm not coming from an anglo-saxon tradition, I don't really know if there's an actual standard or if there exist indeed farkle boxes. And even if there are farkle boxes, I don't have one, it doesn't exist where I live. So I must understand from what I find on the Internet, and sources are often contradicting or at least don't always well overlap with eachother.
When I were programming farkle, it seemed that the rules where quite liberal and that there weren't something really standard. Point me to an official farkle federation of something of that kind if it exists.
My only true delibrate choice, and I confirm that it was against all sources, were to squeeze a zero. My opinion is that it doesn't bring anything to the game anyway. I can't explain this with my English but compare 100$ with 10000 cents; that's the same but counting in cents make you falsely think it's more expensive; it's just useless. I don't know if you can understand what I mean.