If you're stuck in a rut of "couple gets together, gets married, has babies, work to the top of their careers" type stuff, then stop it! Start a new family and play it utterly differently than you normally do! It's refreshing to get out of your comfort zone. Try:

• One or more hot romance sims living in a house. Try to break up as many marriages as you can!
  
• A grumpy loner who shuns all romantic relationships and is a workaholic.
  
• Try to run some successful affairs without getting caught!
  
• Stay-at-home sims - if you've been having sims have regular careers, try having a novelist, painter, crafter, etc.
  
• Had small families up until now? Try having a family with tons of babies! Or if you've always done big families, stick with just one or two children - or even none!
  
• If you never let your sims age to elder... try letting your sims grow old and die and raise the next generation!
  
• Stop cheating! If you're making your sims' lives too easy upping their needs and giving them money, knock it off! Instead, look for hacks which can make their lives harder! Higher bills, harder grades, harder homework - anything which can increase the challenge!
  
• Think about things you haven't done or haven't tried before - and then do them! Whatever you do, stop playing the way you have been, because it's boring!

Most of us have several EPs... and a great number of us have never used a lot of the features! Now's a great time to try out things you never have before, and maybe discover fun new aspects of the game you hadn't thought of!

• Base game: Get abducted by aliens! Send an adult male sim, and come back alien pregnant! More info here.
  
• University: Go to college! Take a sim through college and get them great grades - or spend the whole time partying! Join a secret society (more info here)! Then once they're finished, get them a job in one of the college-only careers.
  
• Nightlife: Go on dates! Use the gypsy matchmaker! Take two completely incompatible sims out and figure out how to get them a dream date! Try going bowling, out dancing at a club, rock out in the Electro-Dance-Sphere!
  
• Nightlife: Become a vampire! See how it is to live as a creature of the night, never seeing the sun, and going, "Bleh!" all the time!
  
• Open for Business: Run a business! You can run a business not only on a community lot, but also from home - both of which offer their own unique challenges. Get your business up to five stars, keep your employees happy, and see just how successful you can become. Already tried a business? Try a different type! Do a makeover salon, an art gallery, a bakery, a toy shop, a florist, an electronics store, a restaurant, an arcade, a real estate office... Make your sim into a business tycoon!
  
• Open for Business: Make some servos! It'll take quite a while of tinkering making smaller robots on the robot crafting station (or you could just cheat with testingcheats and spawn one) but have your very own robot friend who can run amok and electrocute you!
  
• Pets: Have tons of pets! Make an old cat lady! If you've had the regular cats and dogs, try getting a womrat or a bird. If you have Open for Business, try breeding your pets and running a pet shop! Or spend some time in Create a Pet making all sorts of strange and cool new pet breeds.
  
• Pets: Become a werewolf! Howl and stalk the night all furry and scary. More info here.
  
• Seasons: Have a garden, and grow all your own produce. Try the juicer and see what cool effects you can get from different juice recipes. See how big a garden you can run and what kind of profits you can make. Join the garden club and try out the wishing well. More info on all that here.
  
• Seasons: Become a plant sim! Discover a whole new way to play including different needs by going green. Create spores of happiness and please all your friends. More info here.
  
• Bon Voyage: Take a vacation to each of the three vacation destinations. Collect all of the souveniers. Dig for treasure till you find the maps to the secret lots in each place, and meet the secret NPCs - the ninja, the witch doctor, and bigfoot!
  
• Free Time: Find out all about what the different hobbies have to offer. Craft your own pottery or clothing, and sell it if you have OfB. Visit the secret hobby lots. Get the genie!

There are tons of cool game challenges which you can try - ranging from long-term challenges like the Legacy Challenge, to shorter, crazier challenges like the Asylum Challenge. These challenges usually have certain rules (which you can choose to follow or not!) and direct you to play a certain way.

For a great list of challenges including their rules and discussion threads about them, see our Challenges Forum!

This works best if you have Seasons for fishing and gardening, but you can use Echo's harvestable crops if you don't have Seasons. Make a family, make a house for them, don't cheat, and have them live off their garden and pond exclusively - no buying groceries, no working outside of the home (though they can do other activities like crafting as long as they stay at home), and children don't go to school. If they get successful enough, you can have them sell off some of their excess produce to other sims in the neighborhood... you can even run the whole neighborhood off the land - all food must be purchased from your farmers!

There's lots of discussion and more ideas on this play style on this thread.

For many people, this can be just as fun and addictive (if not more so!) than actually playing the game. With all the help, support, tutorials, and info available to you, why not try it? Some of the more advanced stuff can be quite complicated, but you may surprise yourself at how well you do at simple things like walls and floors and recolouring objects and clothing.

"Don't Panic, Start Here!" is a great starting point for beginning creators and links you to the proper tutorials for complete creating noobs.[/url]

Shocking, I know! But absence does make the heart grow fonder, and if you're just bored as hell with TS2, go play something else! There are tons of fun games out there - go play an RPG, a first-person shooter, a city-builder, an arcade game - whatever you like, just something different. Put TS2 aside for a day, a week, a month, and then come back later once you're refreshed.