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.
Quotes about gameplay
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.
When people play games, they have an experience. It is this experience that the designer cares about. Without the experience, the game is worthless.
Trying to create “emergent gameplay,” that is, interesting strategic actions, has been likened to tending a garden, since what emerges has a life of its own, but at the same time, it is fragile and easily destroyed.