First Player

Kjetil Valle

About this app

The most useless (and most often ignored) rule of any board game is usually the first player rule. But useless does not necessarily mean boring. These rules can be quite quirky and fun!

The problem is that they tend to be fixed, often letting the same player go first every time the game is played. And let's be honest, even the funniest rule gets stale rather quickly…

So, what if you could use a new rule every time you played? This app contains more than 500 different "first player" rules, collected from various board games for you to search through. Or get a random rule to use for your board game session by the press of a button.

And if you're interested in the game the rule came from there is of course a link back to the game's page on BoardGameGeek.com where you can find more information.

Ratings and reviews

A fun little app to randomly pick a first player rule if the games you play always end up with the same player starting. Also fun to scroll through and see some of the silliest ones!

Simply amazing! This is a true passion project to bring all the silly first player rules in an easy to use/search/retrieve format, to help boardgames solve the ubiquitous "who goes first?" problem. It's also just hilarious to read!

Thank you for the app and also keeping it updated! I use it multiple times a week and our group loves it!

What’s new

Added 27 new rules, for a new total of 1259 rules in the collection.