You know, there's one excellent way to fix that..
Yeah, I could learn to tolerate pain better by pouring iodine into a paper cut too.
I don't like the design of Prosperity. In MLB Showdown we banned the cards generated in 2002 in our local league. In GOSU we have a house rule about how many turns you can take when your opponent passes. In Pathfinder, we simplified some of the combat rules for faster, leaner combat and we generally skew our sessions to lower levels. In MMOs, I tend to exclusively hang out on RP servers and ignore power-gaming completely. I guess I'm used to (and feel entitled to) cater my gaming experience to taste.
I would be more civil about the refusal, if there was a simpler mechanism to do that. But I feel I have some right to ensure the game I'm about to play is enjoyable and Colony games, are not to my taste. Actually, when I originally started I biased my selection to base set (its my favorite set by far, because I find it simple and elegant). I did really well when I did this. But then I felt this was a tad unfair, so I changed this.
I do wind up playing Colony games sometimes, when I am offered a veto game. When I get a veto game, I always veto "random", so that I am not purposely vetoing nasty attacks. So that's when I get "stuck" with a Colony game.
I hope that doesn't come across as arrogant, it's just a preference thing.
I think I'd like to play you at some point, ChaosRed. Our playstyles seem to be different enough to make it a really fascinating clash of approaches.
Of course, I'd love that! You'd likely kick my ass though. I have two types of wins:
1. I play a player clearly less skilled than me, usually several levels lower and clearly from the outset not quite ready to truly compete on isotropic, even with the likes of me.
2. The board is easy to read and in this case, if I win, I win narrowly, or I win because I got the slightly luckier draw at the end to grab the win. I win a lot by just 1 or 2 points in games like this.
I tend to lose when the board has a subtle or complex engine I don't see, or I fuck up (which happens a lot). My play style is usually pretty simple. I rarely build a complex engine, I usually reach for obvious and well-known tactics (I recently won with double JOAT+BM), and I tend to lean towards treasure heavily (in fact I tend to lose most when I fail to do that). I think this is why I often get accused of being "lucky" by higher-ranked players, because it's usually pretty obvious what I am up to and its rarely elegant or subtle...but if I'm lucky it is sometimes effective.