Firstly, to me it’s not a game to play. Secondly, house rules are not created for “sweet revenge” but to create a sense of order and consistency in one’s life.
In normal families without a great amount of dysfunction, the adult children generally mirror the values of their parents so the house rules with which they were raised make sense to them to continue.
In the case of severely dysfunctional families of origion (alcoholics/addicts being a prime example) the adult children strive for the opposite of the chaos they grew up with. So whatever rules they have in their own homes are an attempt to make order out of their own lives, not done for “sweet revenge.”
After her first child was born, my sister once commented to me that, for her, the fact that our Mother had died relieved her of the conflict about exposing her child to an alcoholic grandmother.
There was no “sweet revenge” about it. Just the very sad realization that had she still been alive, she would have to prohibit her from visiting because her household was a non drinking, non smoking place. It would have been a very unfortunate scenario.
Revenge is not sweet. It’s bitter and destructive to one’s inner being as someone above has already mentioned.
Out of all my friends and acquaintances, I can honestly say that I don’t know of a single one of them who set up their household rules as a game of one-upmanship with their parents nor to exact any type of “revenge”. I just find that to be a really strange concept.