I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.
This reminded me of (and it’s an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.
I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.
Gowlfing. You go bowling, but you put the bumpers up so no one can gutterball and you play for the lowest score. Everyone is equally bad at it, it’s hilarious to play, and it confuses the shit out of other lanes.
Speed minigolf. It’s minigolf, but if your ball comes to a complete stop you have to start back at the tee with all the swings you’ve already taken. The ball and the club have to be in motion when they collide or you start again. So it leads to everyone galloping through the course, shouting numbers as they swing and desperately trying to get the right angle on a moving target. Do not play when there are other guests.
Monopoly deal is remarkably fun for a monopoly spin off. It’s even more fun with two decks and everyone plays for 5 sets.
For a short while I had a ttrpg version of magic the gathering. Not the d&d tie ins, it was commander, but your commander is a character sheet with stat based rules to allow you to pick any card that meets the requirements. You start off with only a 2 drop rare, and as you level up you get perks that change that. Every game you play with that deck earns experience, and once a month we’d do a dungeon crawl as our characters, using our signature noncreature cards from our decks. It was fun while it lasted but life always gets in the way.
Twister. It’s twister, but you have to get up and spin around for 10 seconds each time.
Hand of Glory. It’s played with tarot cards because French tarot an poker aren’t intractable enough. Each player has 7 cards in hand, you have to make a set of 5 in classic poker values, with a 6th card that’s a major arcana and a 7th spare. Each turn you draw a card and discard a card. You may take the top of the deck or the top of the discard. A player may discard a major arcana when another player draws a card to trade it with the drawing player for the card they would’ve gotten. When you have a winning hand you declare your clutch, and the other players may play a major arcana that’s higher than yours to block you from winning. You may in turn block this by playing a higher card from your spare. If you don’t you discard your hand and draw 7, they take your losing major arcana. If the fool is played to block a winning clutch, all players discard their hands. If the World is used to block a winning clutch, that is a hand of fate and the blocking player is allowed to immediately play a winning clutch if they have one. If the world is played as the arcana for a winning clutch, that’s a Hand of Glory and can only be blocked by playing the fool. Conventionally, the game is repeatedly shuffled up and dealt until a Hand of Glory is played, at that point the player with the most wins is the Victor.