Game Design and Frustrating Experiences

Had a frustrating experience at a game shop tonight. I'd just bought the fantasy combat game "Tail Feathers" boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17… and brought that, only to have to put it all back away because I'd forgotten one necessary set of cards out of the unreasonable number of doodads and tokens and counters it has. I'm now regretting buying it. (Also because the plastic minis are nicely detailed yet so hard to distinguish that they cry out for detailed painting that I don't have the time and inclination to do.) Afterward, I got three other people to play the pony RPG card game "Buck: Legacy" and had such a bad time we quit and I question whether I'll ever play that one again.

Looking back on my review of "Buck", I did notice some of its problems. It has confusingly written rules with nonsensical or misleading terms, heroes can get KOed by sheer luck before the player has done anything, KOed players get to sit there and watch their friends play, and if you do get the right spells/items it suddenly becomes trivial to be knocked out. What I liked was that sense of "being a fantasy adventurer rather than a collection of stats", and I still agree with that. I also still like the idea that there's an experience in between adventures, so that the life of a hero doesn't consist solely of the dungeon crawling, and dislike that this town experience is basically just an item vending machine. If there's going to be a competitive element it could be done in a way like "Dungeoneer", in which the heroes are cooperative but their players accumulate Bad Stuff points that the other players use against them like a rotating GM.

It seems like there's an undiscovered happy medium in between board gaming, PC gaming, and D&D-style RPGs. Something that takes advantage of players' imagination while providing enough detail that players uncomfortable with freeform have some guidance. Few expensive physical pieces. Simple rules. Something like... the Fate RPG but done with a mostly abstract board and cards and pawns, something like the abstract Piecepack boardgamegeek.com/image/163907… system but more thematic. At no point should players be eliminated, co-op or competitive play should be possible, and there should be the chance at a "legacy" game where a group develops its own unique recurring setting.