Randomness and Luck in Board Games

I've been playing a very neat game by Terry Goodchild called, "Sport of Kings" -- a horse racing simulation game. There is really no information about the game on board game geek, but here is a link for those that are interested: http://flyhi.de/games/lambourne2.html (you will need to scroll down the page a bit).

I played one race and noticed that the only real decisions in the actual race (pre-race activities have a lot of little decisions to make: choose the appropriate horse for the distance, the jockey, whether to use a special "supremely fit" card on the horse and so on) was whether to put the horse "under pressure" to run faster. It is a little risky because your odds of moving faster usually equal the odds of going slower. This is a very important decisions to make during the race. Individual horses are quite different and some horses perform better under pressure opposed to others. There is a learning curve in learning how to best run your horses.

While the game works beutifully as a simulation and is simple, I was personally a little disappointed by the lack of decisions in the actual race itself. However, the game was still fun to play.

I have noticed with having played games with my girlfriend's kids and some of her family members (who played board games in the past as kids and never really thereafter) is that (especially with the kids) the more randomness involved in the game, the more they seemed to enjoy it. Have you guys noticed a similar trend?

Is it also fair to say, that in general, more serious gamers are quite adverse to games that have an abundance of randomness or chaos in it.

The "Sport of Kings" game is one of Lambourne Games' best sellers that appeals to a much wider audience of causual gamers and more along the lines of even a family audience.

The reason I'm relating this is to point out that a game can have a limited amount of interesting decisions and still be fun where people will want to play again. I think a lot of the fun with more casual games has to do with the randomness inherent in the game. Like real life, there is excitement in seeing the horses pass each other or fall behind, not really being totally certain who will win, even up to the final stretch (note that this is not totally random as horses to perform on average better than others). There is no doubt that randomness can be exciting for players.

As designers our main stay is producing interesting decisions for players, but I think the amount of randomness and interesting decisions should be curtailed or enchanced for the audience you are trying to sell to. I think the more interesting decisions there are, people need to think more. I believe the more casual and family type audience is somewhat adverse to this. I think they approach a game as a traditional sense of a game: not to be taken seriously with the main intent of having fun with little effort involved.

I think if you are going to make a light game it is important to keep it simple and have a sufficient amount of randomness in there. If you are trying for a more sophisticated, more complicated game then the element of chance needs to be strongly curtailed.

Maybe the ideal is producing a game that does an excellent balance of randomness mixed with a healthy dose of interesting decisions so the outcome of the game is influenced by luck and also skill. Or an idea is to design a game where players have a choice at various stages to go the more strategic make-interesting-decisions route, or one more filled with randomness and less interesting decsions.

What do you guys think? What games do you feel promotes a good balance between the two extremes of randomness and no-randomness (more random orientated or more thought or strategy orientated)? What games, in your opinion, have the quality that both kids and fairly serious gamers can sit down and enjoy equally.

Thanks,

--DarkDream