For me, a game succeeds at telling a good story when you can write down the session as an interesting tale, ideally in a way that an unsuspecting person would hardly recognize as a session report, but the player who knows the game well can reconstruct the game flow from it.
Quotes by Ignacy Trzewiczek
Designing games is basically trashing stuff. You trash stuff all the time. No mercy for your beloved ideas. Every single day you are looking for a better solution and that is all that counts.
Your game is filled with rules that don’t add anything to the gameplay. They don’t make the game better. They don’t give more choices. They don’t elicit more emotions. They just exist. They just exist because you got used to them after all those test games.
But board games usually do not offer both good immersion and good gameplay. There is a reason for that—the game mechanics themselves. To achieve real immersion, you need the player to forget about mechanics and approach the game situations intuitively, as if they were real.
I love to identify with a story hero… but honestly, board games are not the strongest medium for this. A good book or movie offers this more efficiently.