What's with us and luck-based games?

[packbat]

We don't have an answer for this one, but it's kind of interesting to us: a lot of the games that we play a lot in a zoning-out or while-listening-to-something-else way are:

• Short games
• with a significant strategy element
• but so much luck that we often just lose without recourse.

Solitaire games are like this. Minesweeper is like this. A lot of deckbuilding games are like this. "Forward" by Christophe Coyard is like this. "Castle Defense" by watabou is like this. These are games we can win if we play well enough and don't get screwed over by luck, but that we lose a lot because we do get screwed over by luck. (In Cards with Personalities, we're sitting at a 56% win rate after literally thousands of games.)

...it's probably, like, a random reinforcement thing. We know what to do but we don't know if we'll get rewarded, so the reward feels bigger when it happens.

We're not playing any games that try to get money out of the players, though.