yea there may very well be more skill in a rebuild game than in a basic village/smithy engine.
i still think there are low skill cards though.
Notice rebuild wasn't one of my examples
It might be a "one-card strategy," but it's got a lot of tactics mixed in.
People mistake playing actions for decisions, sorry playing 5 Labs or your Village/Smithy chain does not constitute a significant decision.
I'm not saying the only interesting boards are engines. In fact I find Lab to be one of those annoying "open two silver and whoever wins the split wins the game" cards in a significant portion of the games it appears in. I do find, though, that villages tend to make the other cards around them more useful; they let you have more different cards in your deck, which leads to decisions about which cards to buy, and how and when to play them.
I have to politely disagree with you on that point. But I guess I don't know what your metric of "too many" is. Out of my past 20 games the following 3 are the only 3 that weren't too interesting to me.
In a perfect world one is too many, but okay, I'll do the same exercise for my last 20 games...
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409888181462.txtWe're gonna three-pile on Curse, Duchy and Duke. Yawn. The only decisions that felt less than automatic were "Second Sea Hag?" (if I happen to hit exactly $4 a second time early, then yes), and how many Vaults before Duchy.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409870770980.txtMasq is the only draw but it's still gotta be Goons engine, right?
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.508ae4c20cf264ac914cc446.1409868943740.txtJack. Nuff said.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409864586924.txtWin the Amb fight, win the game.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409863785973.txtBishop/Fortress. Too bad too, cause there are some neat cards otherwise. There might even be a more complicated Bishop engine (trashing Gold gained with Explorer) if the village was anything other than Fortress. Probably Grand Markets would be better than Bishop/Explorer, but even that's more fun than just seeing who trashes down to the golden deck faster.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409861865384.txtHerald is still shiny and new so the jury's out on it, but I'm starting to think if there's even a decent cantrip for it to hit (here Baker), then the high chance of being +2 cards, +2 actions makes it dominant for a $4-cost. I'm afraid it could become another "win the split, win the game" card on a lot of its boards. Let's count this game as half.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140904/log.516d33dbe4b082c74d7b39fa.1409861147658.txtNothing to mitigate the Cultist-shaft here. Lots of interesting cards but it doesn't matter if 7 ruins = game over, and Cultist makes it much easier to have a 7-3 junk split than any other attack. If I had to pick one card I never want to see again, Cultist would be it.
6.5/20 = 32.5% (counting the Herald game as half). I agree that your 15% is not too many, but I think my one-third is. Maybe I've had a bad run of random boards lately, maybe you've had a good one, hard to tell with the small samples we have here.