TIL my group spent 3 hours arguing over a rule that was printed on the box the whole time
Last Saturday we were about 40 minutes into our fourth game of the night at my place in Boise when a fight broke out over whether you could trade resource cards on another player's turn. Two guys swore up and down you could, my buddy's wife said no way, and I just sat there because I honestly didn't know either. We ended up digging through the rulebook online, screenshots flying in the group chat, someone pulled up a forum thread from 2011, total mess. Then my roommate walked by, picked up the box lid, and read the answer out loud from the back panel in like 4 seconds. Everyone got real quiet. We'd been playing this game for close to 2 years and not once had anyone checked the box itself. Now I'm wondering how many other house rules we've been running that were never actual rules. What's the dumbest rule argument your group has ever had, and did the box save you or just make it worse?
Learned this the hard way with Catan too, we argued for like an hour about whether you could build a settlement on a port without a road leading to it. My cousin finally just flipped the box over and there it was in plain English. Felt so dumb because the answer was right there the whole time and we never once thought to look. Now I check the box first before anyone opens their mouth and it has saved us so many pointless fights.