When playing a new game, most of the time people are intrigued and facinated by the game. Once they played, if they like the game, the fascination might still hold on a couple of games. But when the players have intensively played the game and know all the strategies, all the facination is gone and the game is a simple mathemanical puzzle.
When designing a game, the process is simillar. When you get a new idea and start designing, you are facinated about your own design. Even if you succeed your design, you would have playtested and analysed your game so much that in the end you lose any fascination you had.
For a game designer not beign facinated about his own game seems a bit more normal to me even if I would still loved to be fascinated about a game I made. Beign able to analyse a game deeply prevent the possibility of having a badly designed game. So losing facination is the price to pay for making a better game.
But would it be possible for the players to always keep the fascination what ever is the number of time they played the game?
Now you could ask yourself, what makes people lose fascination?
Personally I think that players lose fascination when they know how the game works. When they know all the strategies and the odds.
Now would it be possible to make the game harder to analyse or make it pointless for the player to take the time to analyse. Like creating some sort of cloud over the game that the player cannot see throught but that the designers should be able to take a look.
variety: My first idea would be to have a large amount of variety. For example, I Arkham Horror, you use around 10 to 20 mythos cards in a game, but the game supplies around a 100. So each game will be different and it will take a lot of time before you can see the events again. And if you do, there are expansions. So forget about remembering cards and be surprised all the time.
Surprise: Yes, Surprises are very important. If the player could be surprised all the time, that could increase the fascination for the game.
Complexity: In games like Battle tech, where the system is very complex, there is so much rules that are used in rare situations that it adds variery and novelty to each game.
Do you have other ideas? Is it all about variety and replay value?
Variety could be added as optional or advanced rules. An example that comes to my mind is Agricola (OK, I hate agricola). When playing with beginners, some people said you do not use special cards. But later you can use the cards and then you can add expansion cards. So the learning curve is better and when you add variety, the players already know where thay want to go.
So replayability seems to be important. Good for me since that is one of my objectives in my design. In games like arkham horror where tons of expansions are added, I think it is a way to keep the replayability. Still, on my point of view, a good design should have an relatively good level of replayability without adding tons of expansion stuff.