Apparently our tastes differ. [...] "what even am I do?!?" [...] lots of fun.
You are saying you enjoy being thrown to the wolves, as much or more as there being just a little uncertainty? [...]
I think you might have read a little more into my words than I intended to put there, but only a little bit.
I like playing a game where I know some rules of thumb and understand why they're generally true—such as "trashing is good" and "drawing your entire deck is good" and "
Chapel is better in engines than in big money" and "
Port is often a better buy than
Bustling Village" and "
Mountebank is stronger than
Fortune Teller".
I also like when my expectations are thrown out the window. I like it when there's no "there's one trasher, one village, one terminal draw, one +buy and an attack to slow a money player down—I'm building the engine; let's see, can I throw any of the other cards in for support?" and also not even a "there's
Enchantress and
City Quarter which is strong draw that I'm not used to mathing; there's only slow trashing in
Sacrifice and there's alt-VP in Castles but that's a lot of green cards which will hurt my action density—gee, I wonder if it's better than the best money strategy?"
I like it when boards are just completely weird and nothing fits together and you have to glue something together that accomplishes
something, but however you do it it's going to be weird and awkward and you'll always go "does this even make sense?"
But, and this is the thing I probably didn't convey all that well: I like that as a
diversion. I like having a game that's somewhat reasonably well-understood most of the time and a completely crazy a handful of times every blue moon.