Minigolf but everyone goes at the same time, taking turns hitting your own ball like in pool. Hitting other people’s balls is allowed but you always try to aim for the hole. Also, have ice cream while at it.

Hexagonal Tic-Tac-Toe, because it’s pretty interesting. It may sound simple, but the altered rules make the game a lot more challenging.

I found it through this video if anyone is interested. They have more videos on the matter too.

Magic the Gathering “Commander” rules, but with 60 cards, any Uncommon creature as commander, and only common cards in the deck (pauper). More fun factor than Standard, and doesn’t take forever to play. Dandân sounds fun.

There’s a variant of the card game War called Spoils of War, or Sow, that adds some strategy:

There can be up to five cards max in a player’s reserves. These cards can be pulled out in any battle and added to the player’s fighting card. Opponants have to option to do the same, and the original player can respond. This continues until all players can’t or won’t add any more and the highest total wins.

Aces beat all face cards but lose to all number cards. In a reserve battle, aces count for eleven.

In any regular battle, any player can choose to sacrifice two facedown cards to place the fighting card into her reserves. The sacrificed cards go to the winner of that battle. If all players do this, the sacrificed cards are claimed by the winner of the next battle.

If the two highest fighting cards in are tied (a “war” in the original game), or there’s a three-way circle of Ace beats Face beats Number beats Ace, or the totals in a reserve battle are tied, those players must place five face-down cards for the winner of the next battle to claim. Only those involved in the stand-off play the next battle.

The winning player of each battle may place all cards taken in that battle at the bottom of her deck in whatever order she chooses.

Overall, it adds a bit of strategic depth while still keeping a small footprint in tablespace and setup time.

As a kid , in the midwest winters, late 90s, we would play a lot of games inside. With cousins or siblings.

Usually too many people to play traditional games with.

So we would double the game components and invent new ways to make it work.

One I remember the most was Rummy 10,000. Or that’s what we called it. Not sure if it was infact rummy 5000 but altered. I think it did have some of the traditional rummy 5000 rules but it wasn’t quite the same.

We played with two decks of cards. One black. One red. There was some rules or something about the deck color.

I honestly can’t recall the extra rules off the top of my head. But I do recall it was very fun. 6-8 players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Rummy (Double deck rummy)

https://gamerules.com/rules/5000-rummy/ (Single or double deck)

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.

Since most people are unbeatable at tic-tac-toe I have a variant I like to play that has nested boards. Sometimes I call it tic-tic-tac-toe-toe or nested tic-tac-toe. Here’s some shitty MS Paint to explain (red numbers indicate the board, the blue the squares on the board as they correlate to bigger board):

Rules:

• You have a tic-tac-toe board where each square is itself another tic-tac-toe board
• The outer board is numbered 1-9 going from top left to bottom right
• Each sub-board is also numbered the same way, 1-9, left to right
• When you play on board, the square you play in determines the board that your opponent must play in next
  • For example: if you play the middle left square (4), on the bottom right board (Red 9), then your opponent must play on the middle left board next (Red 4)
• Winning a sub-game wins that square on the overall board
  • You may tie a sub-game by filling a board, those squares are dead and nobody gets them
• Getting tic-tac-toe on the overall board gets you a win
• You cannot play on a finished board
• If a play would force a player to play on a finished board then that player may play anywhere instead

It sounds confusing on paper but once you draw the board and play like 2 turns people immediately get what’s going on. It’s really funny to observers because they watch people make “obviously” bad plays on these disjointed boards and they have no idea what’s going on

I also once nerd sniped an intro programming class because I thought making this in the command line would be a fun project for one of my intro assignments. It turns out updating and printing nested python lists can get very confusing very quickly

I think it might be interesting to see (association) football played with no formal rule changes, but with the referees swapped out for hockey refs.

Nine ball soccer… that is silly fun to play.

I have been to a Savanah Bananas, game and it was a lot of fun.

In gym we used to play volleyball with an gigantic heavy ball.

Since you brought up chess, I’ve always found chess boxing as an interesting concept.

I’ve never actually played a game (but I have a set!), but, shogi, or, Japanese chess.

• Nine rows, nine ranks. Three nearest you are yours. The middle three are no man’s land.

• The second rank only contains generals, two of the new pieces. There’s a silver general and a gold general. Nine pawns.

• Any captured piece can be reclaimed, at the cost of a turn. It goes back to its starting position (which must be open).

• All pieces are 2D tiles with black kanji designations. The tiles are directional and always point away from you. (They’re slightly pentagonal.)

• All pieces can promote by reaching the ninth row. You flip the tile over and the designation becomes red and it gains new moves. (Its name changes too.)

• Most pieces can’t move backwards. This is one of the main abilities of a promoted (red) piece. The tile always points at your opponent.

• Games are timed like chess in official matches, and I assume they take longer. They’re typically played on the floor, though I think that’s more a Japanese thing than a shogi thing.

If you’re inclined toward anime at all, March Comes in Like a Lion is a nice little cosy slice of life story about a shogi player (and the insert song Nyan Shogi is a bop you’ll love to hate (it’s cats teaching you how to play Shogi)).

When we play ookie cookie, no matter who finishes last I eat the cookie.

Always enjoy those videos from Japan of 100 (or more) school kids playing football ⚽ against a handful of professionals.

Eg: https://youtu.be/MYFcTWKcuQM

Another one, this time from Germany: https://youtu.be/iEOKI2jeETM