Strategy, tactics and actions should be derived from players’ goals and enable them to focus on how they operate within the system to win, not the restrictions defined by the rules. When players must, or are forced to, focus on the logic and structure of the rules they can lose interest in a game regardless of its other merits.
Quotes by Russ Williams
The game mechanic is the part of a game that separates it from a book, a movie, a photograph or even a conversation.
Often “special cases” are only “special” because the rule author or game designer didn’t see a higher-level pattern or principle that neatly captures a whole set of “special cases”, or because the author/designer didn’t realize they were stating redundancies that are simply unnecessary.