A while ago I talked about luck and its importance to games. Most games, of course, require some combination of skill and luck to win. One point I missed in that first article is that the element of luck can reduce the ego-investment in the game; it can make you feel better about losing. Consider Settlers of Catan, for example. You’re down 5 points to 6 and things aren’t looking all that great; suddenly, 6 3’s are rolled out of 7 turns, and you don’t have any settlements on a 3. The guy who just happened to build two cities on a 3 soars into the lead, of course, but you won’t feel bad if you lose the game. “Nothing I could have done to plan for that,” you tell yourself, and it’s probably even mostly true.

By contrast, one of the good things about playing a game that involves considerable skill and thought is that you feel a sense of accomplishment if you win. Settlers of Catan is a shining example here, too. There are so many opportunities and decisions, in building and trading, that as you succeed you can feel the plans you’ve made fall into place. Sure, you’re also getting decent dice rolls, but not much better than you would expect by chance alone. Right?

In this way, Settlers of Catan really shines. All players get to have accomplishments as they go, whether or not they end up winning; the winner feels the win was a vindication of skill, and the losers can point to some run of bad luck or another to soften the emotional blow. Everyone walks away having had fun, and I think this is an important part of the game’s enduring popularity.

This is on my mind because reader Fu Leng picked up a game at GenCon that seems to somehow get this exactly backwards. The game is Gold Digger and here’s the rundown of the rules: There are six mines. Each mine can hold five gold cards. You have a hand of three cards from a deck that contains half gold cards (of varying values from 0-8) and half cards that entitle you to place one claim, if you wish, on a certain mine. You have only 3 claims all game and playing them is irrevocable. And the end of the game, the gold on each mine is divided evenly among the claims to that mine.

The mechanics seem sound and they are; it’s a Knizia game. Here’s why the game is frustrating to me. There are several opportunities for luck, but they mostly involve you (or someone else) having the right card at the right time, and you won’t realize that luck is involved at the time. For instance, you lay claim to an unused mine when nobody happens to have any low-value gold cards to waste on it; by the time somebody else draws a card that would let them stake claims on it, they’re out of claims or they think they have bigger fish to fry. Or, let’s say you happen to get 12 gold on a mine you claim and the neighboring mine only has 10. Great! Except that then your opponent, who has cards for both mines, will claim yours, splitting it, while the 10 would have gone uncontested. But you didn’t know, when you claimed that mine, that it would have 12, and you couldn’t have waited, because your ability to keep cards in your hand.

Are there opportunities for both skill and luck? Certainly. But sometimes when you win, it’s because you drew the really high-value gold cards, or exactly the right claim at the right time; and sometimes when you lose, you just can’t figure out what went wrong when. It’s certainly interesting to play and think about, but I don’t… want to play it.

Next time, I think, I will talk about a similar, contemporary, game—with the same play time and same author, no less—and try to understand why they’re different.