Another reason locked perks and blessings is a huge problem

no but that doesn’t matter (when skill is equal) about 1 game out of 20, does it? the random element, statistically, determined the outcome.

these are all useful examples because they demonstrate quite clearly several things you can observe over game design more generally:

  1. games that are high skill determinant routinely have random determinant outcomes that players drastically underestimate because they centre the skill factor in their analysis

  2. games that are high random determinant routinely have skill determinant, often very strongly so eg poker, but players dramatically underestimate because they center the random factor in their analysis

  3. none of this (explititve) foundationally determines anything about a game’s quality, longevity, audience etc etc. candyland i would say is barely a game and has outsold almost an arbitrary quantity of better designed games, more people play it, have positive memories of it etc.

which to me strongly suggests something i have been banging on about for a long time now and is game design 101 - players don’t hate random, they hate bad odds. they don’t care about games that have chance so long as they are subjectively evaluated as “fair”. and, counterintuitively, they will routinely rate games profoundly unfair mathematically as “fair” if their subjective perspective weighs skill or random based or even something else more highly, or single out games that are truly fair ie random as being particularly unfair.